(Some Spoilers) Not as bad as it looks now some 25 years after it's release. "Hanger 18" is the first major motion picture to bring on the screen the Eric Van Daniken hypothesis from his best selling book "Chariots of the Gods" and the recent, back in 1980, revelations of the mysterious 1947 Roswell crash brought out in the William Moore's UFO classic "The Roswell Incident" and fuses the two subjects together into a movie.
Out in space astronauts Bancroft Price & Gates, Garry Collins James Hampton & J.R Clark, are about to launch a satellite from their space craft when this UFO suddenly appears and hovers over their spaceship. Unable to prevent the launch it goes off and slams into the UFO. The explosion of the satellite cause Gates to be ripped from out of the craft and end up dead. The NASA crew monitoring the launch, back on earth in Huston, catches the entire scene on tape but it's soon deleted, or erased, by orders from higher ups and both Bancroft & Price are implicated in Gates death due to their negligence .
With two weeks before the presidential election President Duncon Tyler's staff headed by Gordon Cain & Frank Lafferty, Robert Vaughn & Joseph Campanella, want the incident to be kept from the public in order not to hurt Tyler's chances for re-election. The UFO that caused all this nervousness in both the White House and the Pentagon wasn't destroyed by the space-crafts satellite it landed safe on earth in Bannon County Arizona with it's two alien pilots, or spacemen, dead of asphyxiation. The news of that amazing fact can well destroy Tyler's chances.
President Tyler made a big issue of his opponent believing in UFO's now just 14 days before the election there's solid evidence that they do exist! With both Bancroft and Price trying to find NASA deputy director and friend Harry Forbes, Darren McGavin, to exonerate them in Gates' death Forbes, and his staff at NASA, are then sent to Wolf AFB in Midland Texas at the facilities Hanger 18 where the UFO is being held.
Not knowing what's happening in the outside world Forbes & Co. were kept in the dark about what was going on with both Bancroft & Price. Forbes and his assistants Paul Bannister, Steven Keats, and Neal Kelso, Andrew Bloch, decipher the alien hieroglyphs and come to the startling conclusion that their not only studying the Human Race but in fact created it tens of thousands of years ago! The aliens may well be the "missing link" between man and ape! Forbes shocked at what he found out astoundingly says of the aliens to his stunned and shocked staff: "Were Their Children!"
Back outside Bancroft & Price who are trying to get to Wolf AFB and Hanger 18 are cased by government agents which results in Price, as well as four agents, getting killed. Finally Bancroft reaching the Wolf military base and getting in touch with Forbes, who found out about what was going on by listening to a radio, and his staff to go pubic with what's been happening at Hanger 18 and how the US government is trying to cover it up.
Feeling that their control of the information about the captured UFO is slipping away from them and that it's only a matter of time before the US, and world, public will know the truth Cain & Co. have a jet, loaded with high explosives, flown into Hanger 18 by remote control in order to destroy the evidence as well as Bancroft Forbes and everyone else in there; planes crash every day a diabolical Cain tells his fellow criminals and future cell-mates.
Cain's scheme is only partly successful because what he didn't count on is that the UFO is not of this earth and thus not subject to the damage that the explosives on the runaway jet plane can do to it. Even more disturbing, to Cain & Co., Forbes Bancroft and Forbes entire NASA staff were in the UFO at the time that the plane crashed into Hanger 18.
