After hosting a movie party, Spencer is found the next day in the middle of a crop circle, claiming he was abducted by aliens; and then other people who attended the party start to go missing as well. Elsewhere, the legislator responsible for Eureka's funding visits the town, and gets dragged into a Sector 5 experiment...

Taggart's theory is that solar flares caused by the eclipse, or the 'Phoenix Effect', are to blame when people start to spontaneously combust. When Carter discovers that a blast of radiation from the artifact had penetrated the wall of the chamber and is actually to blame for the spontaneous combustion, it becomes a race against time to save the other two people exposed - Nathan and Kevin!