A small town in America, summer, 1959. Maple Street. An ice cream vendor pushes his cart up the sidewalk, ringing a bell; kids play stick ball in the street; a neighbor mows his grass with a push mower. Another lies under his car, tinkering with it. In the distance, a dog barks.

Suddenly, the power goes out—all power. Stoves and refrigerators stop working; the radio goes silent; cars won’t start. Neighbors gather in an uneasy group. They begin to speculate about what might be causing the outage, their voices growing strident as speculation turns to suspicion. Could it be the meteor that some of them heard pass overhead earlier?

While one man argues for a rational explanation—sunspots, perhaps—another points the finger at a neighbor who isn’t present, using his odd quirks to irrationally explain the widespread lack of electricity. Then, inexplicably, power returns to a single car in a driveway, and it starts with a rumble. 

“It’s space aliens,” says a young comic book-obsessed boy. “They come to earth disguised to look just like us, and blend in. They’re different, but no one can tell because they’re identical to the rest of us.”

And the man who owns the car that mysteriously starts and stops? He’s as mystified as the other neighbors, but because it’s his car engaging in inexplicable behavior—the engine roaring to life when there’s no one at the wheel—he’s to blame. He must be the alien.

In the end, as the town tears itself apart through self-created fear, the real aliens look down on the town from their cloaked ship. One of them says to the other (and they look as human as the people in the streets below), “The pattern is always the same. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves. Their world is full of Maple Streets. We’ll go from one to the next and let them destroy each other.” 

Rod Serling wraps up the episode as only Rod Serling can do: 

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

I want every living person in the United States to watch this episode, and then think about current events. Clearly, Rod Serling was correct: These things cannot be confined to the fantasy of the Twilight Zone, where they belong.