Stan Harbinger (Joe Pantoliano) is a top-rated talk show host with a flair for the outrageous and a reputation as a skeptic's skeptic. Assisted by his producer Trudy (Cynthia Nixon), Stan takes special delight in shooting down callers who claim to have alien encounters, especially people like Eldon DeVries (Alan Zinyk), who believes his body has been taken over by aliens. However, when Eldon commits suicide by setting himself on fire in front of Stan, things begin to go wrong for Stan. A plan to syndicate the show is threatened by protests from UFO believers, angry at Stan's role in Eldon's death.

Mona Bailey (Jane Adams) lives with her husband Ned (Peter Outerbridge) in the Clackson Arms, an old apartment building that is being taken over, apartment by apartment, by a mysterious developer called KM Inc. Mona is a hypochondriac, an able-bodied woman who rides a wheelchair, who treats the Physician's Desk Reference like a personal bible and who has not left the building in six months for fear of catching a disease. One day she backs her wheelchair into an electrical box and gets a shock, leaving her hearing strange voices and seeing bodies dropping out of windows...

Dr. Mark Crest (Kevin Nealon) has built a teleportation device that uses tactical nuclear weapons to open a wormhole in the space-time continuum. The device is intended to transport some animals eight miles across the desert, but during a test, the wormhole grows out of control and Mark finds himself hurled back in time, to the day before the test took place.

From the outside, the Golden Sunset looks like any other rest home, but Dr. Benton Adler's facility is different in a few unsettling ways. The residents seem to develop Alzheimer's almost overnight and after they do, they live - or are stored - in tiny chambers in a human warehouse.

The true believers have gathered once again for the North American UFO Convention where there are typically squabbles, petty betrayals and egotistical grandstanding. Max Buford has in his possession what appears to be afragment from an alien spaceship. Max's arrival causes a flurry of activity, as the fragment's true origins are thrown into question.

It's late in the 23rd century and the aging interplanetary hauling vehicle Pequod is on a ten-year reclamation project on behalf of The Company, the corporation that has run North America since 2102. The crew is tucked away in hyper-sleep when the ship comes across a mysterious object floating in space. Awakened from their artificial slumber, they retrieve the pod and are shocked to discover the body of Virgil Nygard, executed 150 years earlier for leading his militia in the slaughter of more than a million people. They are even more shocked to discover that Nygard is alive.