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In Boone, North Carolina, Wallace (David Denman) and Angela Schiff (Robyn Lively) return home after a day out hiking in the fields. Angela gets a headache and, while taking a shower, thinks that she sees images of a yellow substance running down the walls. Angela and Wallace head off to bed in one another's arms but as the camera pans out the scene shifts to their skeletal remains in the same position in the middle of a field. FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate and after closer examination of the bones, the two find a strange yellow substance covering the underside of the skeletons which was missed in the original examination. Mulder, believing that bodies are a result of the famous Brown Mountain Lights, heads out to the scene of the discovery while Scully stays behind with the coroner (Jim Beaver) to perform more tests.
As Mulder arrives in the fields, he inadvertently drives over a patch of mushrooms which releases a cloud of hallucinogenic spores. Mulder—unbeknownst to the viewer—begins to hallucinate. He soon discovers Wallace and Angela in a cave, and the two claim they were abducted by aliens, who covered up their disappearance with false skeletons. Later, Scully arrives at Mulder's apartment and he explains to Scully what happened. He shows her an alien that he captured at Brown Mountain. Scully, however, accepts his reasoning without question and Mulder begins to doubt his surroundings. Eventually, after seeing the yellow substance, much like Angela saw, Mulder awakens in the cave he followed Wallace into earlier, covered in the yellow secretion, being digested alive.
Meanwhile, Scully has discovered that the yellow substance mainly consists of organic material found in digestive juices, although it appears plant-like. Arriving at the field, Scully accidentally steps on another mushroom, and begins hallucinating. Scully and the coroner start to look for Mulder, only to find his skeletal remains. Back at the coroner's office, Scully identifies Mulder's remains from his dental records but finds no evidence of the secretion on the skeleton. Later, at Mulder's wake Mulder shows up, clearly alive. Suddenly, the wake congregation disappears. As Mulder and Scully discuss what has happened, they both begin to realize that they are still in the cave being digested by the substance while they are comatose; somehow, they are sharing the same hallucination. As the realization occurs, they both awaken, deep in the cave and Mulder fights his way out of the ground dragging Scully behind him to safety.
Later, in Walter Skinner's (Mitch Pileggi) office, Mulder begins to doubt once more that they are free at all, asking Scully to name any sort of drug that causes its effects to halt once users know they are hallucinating. Scully is in disbelief until Mulder proves his point by shooting Skinner in the chest; the yellow substance oozes out of the bullet wounds. Once again, their surroundings melt away as they awaken underground again in the cave. Mulder sticks his hand through the earth ceiling as Skinner and a team of rescue staff manage to locate them and drag them out and haul them to the safety of an ambulance. Once inside the ambulance, Mulder and Scully weakly hold hands.[1]
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