Near the end of the Cold War, the US government received numerous reports from Southeast Asia of chemical weapons being used against the democratic insurgents. After investigating, they accused the Soviets of supplying the weapons to the communist governments in the area. Matthew Meselson, a Harvard Molecular Biologist, reviewed samples of the substance, but was unconvinced that what the US government found was a weapon. Meselson travels to Thailand with Thomas Seeley, a renowned animal behaviorist from Cornell, to prove that the yellow substance falling from the sky is not a chemical weapon, but a natural phenomena.