The stranger who shows up one morning in a small town in Kentucky with a British passport is stranger than it first seems. He has no hair, no strange eyes, neither nipples, nor navel, nor genitals; he comes to earth as a castaway, as a survivor of a dying, alien planet. The stranger learned English by catching films from Earth and recording twelve at a time. Having landed on Earth, he takes the name Thomas Newton and sneaks into the practice of patent attorney Farnsworth, to whom he casually leaves a bundle of plans on the basis of which a gigantic economic empire can be built. In the course of the film it turns out that this is only a pretext to build a spaceship with which the few other survivors of his home planet are to be saved. Unfortunately for his plans, things soon go hopelessly wrong. The skirt hunter and ex-chemistry professor Nathan Bryce, who has become the stranger's closest confidant, becomes increasingly obsessed with the urge to find out the truth about Newton's origins and goals; business management feels threatened and finally the inventions of the stranger lead to an overstimulation of the economy. Abandoned by his employees and crushed by business competitors, his economic empire collapses and with it his private space project, he is kidnapped and handed over as a guinea pig to a team of doctors who are determined to find out what makes him tick.