Nine young gifted children and their parents gather from around the world for a research conference at a private foundation at Lake Arrowhead, California. The children, who each possess extremely high IQs, have a special gift for language, high skills in various other areas, and all possess some variety of psychic or extrasensory perception. The children, aged four years to nine years, and their parents are to be subjected to intense scrutiny by experts under the auspices of the International Center for the Advanced Study of Gifted Children.

Preliminary evaluation has led to the speculation that these children may share some new genetic strain that indicates evolutionary development. Certain medical tests are on the agenda at the conference including MRI and DNA evaluations.

On the third day of the conference, the children are to be given a special treat–an outing to Disneyland–while the Foundation studies are to focus on the parents. The children leave by bus that morning for the two hour jaunt to Disneyland. They never arrive at Disneyland.

International tensions begin to mount and President Daniel Fitzhugh works hard to calm the reaction and accusations from the homelands of the seven foreign children.

The two Americans, John Warren, widowed father of four-year old Emily, and Denise Fellini, divorced mother of five-year-old Billy, find themselves drawn together as they are pitted against their own government, and led into a labyrinth of intrigue, government cover-up, UFOs, Hopi Shamans, and the paranormal.

What Warren and Fellini discover, not only shakes their own personal sense of reality, but that of their own government and the world.