"Maple Street, U.S.A. Late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice-cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43pm on Maple Street. This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street, in the last calm and reflective moment before the monsters came." - Rod Serling, opening narration.

Small town paranoia and a fear of the unknown is explored here. When a strange object, thought to be a meteorite, flies over Maple Street and disrupts the community's power supply, radio reception, telecommunications and machinery, imaginations start running wild. One child, Tommy, suggests that the meteorite could have been an alien ship, while also rattling off the plot of a comic book or short story wherein monsters from another planet sent down a family with human appearance to scope out a target, before sending in the troops, so to speak.

This one comment, although rebuked at first as meaningless fantasy, somehow takes hold in the fears and suspicions of an alarmed group. Mob psychology starts to transform an otherwise normal and sedate community into an irrational gaggle that starts to eat itself alive, figuratively speaking. When one car does start momentarily, for example, it's owner, Les Goodman and his family are immediately suspected as being agents of the aliens and are virtually lynched by the growing mob. Soon, suspicions soon turn to other families within the group - each member forced to defend his or her quirks and interests as otherwise normal practices are given sinister interpretations.

The situation spirals out of control when one member of the community is shot and another is stoned with decorative rocks from a quaint neighbourhood yard. When lights and other utilities start flickering on and off, the group decends into total chaos and mayhem drives many to violence and murder.

SPOILER ALERT:
The strange irony in all of this is that the 'aliens' did actually exist, but they'd made no contact with thre community. It was they who flew overhead and landed nearby. It was they who were manipulating the town's utilities from a nearby vantage point and they who observed the ease with which it was possible to drive a group of humans to destruction, without using weapons. The aliens had discovered, as many politicians know only too well, the truly influential strength of fear. By drumming up enough of the stuff, the potential conquering force found that they could achieve their means without lifting a finger - the fearful masses would simply destroy themselves.

This is an occasionally frustrating episode, featuring repetitive dialogue and a cast of characters who flock like seagulls from place to place, but the ideas and tone underlying the story is a great representation of the anti-communist paranoia that was prevalent both in parts of American suburbia and in films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the early 1960s.

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record: prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own, for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is... that these things cannot be confined... to The Twilight Zone." - Rod Serling, closing narration.