On a refueling stop in Jakarta, Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus are on their way to Sydney when they meet aircraft industrialist and eccentric millionaire Laszlo Carreidas. Unable to politely refuse Carreidas's offer of a lift, Tintin and his friends join the millionaire on his prototype private jet, the Carreidas 160. Unbeknownst to Carreidas and the others, his secretary Spalding and two of the pilots are in a plot tohijack the plane and bring it to a deserted volcanic island in the Lesser Sunda Islands. After a rough landing, while embarking from the plane, a terrified Snowy bolts from Tintin's arms and runs off. Guards shoot at him, and a horrified Tintin believes that he is killed.
The mastermind of the plot then reveals himself as the evil Rastapopoulos, intent on taking Carreidas' fortune. Captain Haddock's corrupt ex-shipmate, Allan, is present as Rastapopoulos's henchman. The Sondonesians have been hired as mercenaries.
The prisoners are bound and held in Japanese World War II-era bunkers. Rastapopoulos takes Carreidas to another bunker where his accomplice,Doctor Krollspell, injects the millionaire with a truth serum to enable Rastapopulos to learn Carreidas's Swiss bank account number. Unfortunately for Rastapopoulos, Carreidas becomes all too eager to tell the truth about his life of greed, perfidy, and corruption—everything except the Swiss bank account. Furious, Rastapopulos lunges at Krollspell, who is still holding the truth serum syringe, and is accidentally injected. He too recounts hideous deeds in a boasting manner, as he and Carreidas begin to quarrel over who is the more evil. Rastapopoulos reveals that nearly all of the men he recruited, including Spalding, the aircraft pilots, and (the increasingly unnerved) Krollspell, are all marked to be eliminated.
Snowy, alive after all, helps Tintin and his friends escape by distracting the two guards, enabling Tintin to knock them out, and find the bunker where Carreidas is held prisoner. Tintin and Captain Haddock bind and gag Krollspell, Rastapopulos, and even the irascible Carreidas, and escort them to lower ground, intending to use Rastapopulos as a hostage. However, the serum wears off and Rastapopulos escapes as Allan detects the escaping prisoners. However, Krollspell, in fear of Rastapopoulos, throws in his lot with Tintin and Haddock; he is subsequently released and continues to accompany Tintin and Haddock, watching the still irritable Carreidas.
Tintin, led by a telepathic voice, guides the protagonists to discover a hidden entrance to a cave. Through a large hallway they discover a temple hidden inside the island's volcano, guarded by an ancient statue that has all the appearances of a modern astronaut. Penetrating deeper into the volcano, Tintin and his friends meet Mik Kanrokitoff, a writer for the magazine Space Week, who reveals to them that his is the guiding voice that they have followed, having received it into their minds via a telepathic transmitter. Kanrokitoff obtained the device from an extraterrestrial race, who were formerly worshipped on the island as gods and who use it as a landing-point to contact Earth's people.
An earthquake and explosion set off by Rastapopoulos and his men triggers a volcanic eruption. Despite Carreidas's irascible behaviour, Tintin and his party finally reach relative safety inside the volcano's crater bowl. Meanwhile, Rastapopoulos and his henchmen flee the eruption by running down the outside of the volcano and launch a rubber dinghy from Carreidas' plane.
Once Tintin and his friends find their way out of the volcano, Kanrokitoff puts them all under hypnosis and summons a flying saucer piloted by the extraterrestrials. The hypnotised group boards the saucer, narrowly escaping the volcano's dramatic eruption. Kanrokitoff spots the rubber dinghy and exchanges Tintin and his companions (except Krollspell, who is taken back to his base in Cairo with hypnotic-induced amnesia) for Allan, Spalding, Rastapopulos, and the treacherous pilots, who are whisked away in the saucer to an unknown fate. The group awakens from hypnosis and cannot remember what happened to them. Professor Calculus has a souvenir, though—a crafted rod of alloyed cobalt, iron, and nickel, which he had found in the caves. The cobalt is of a state that does not occur on Earth, and is the only evidence of a close encounter with its makers. Only Snowy, who cannot speak, remembers the hijacking and alien abduction.
The story ends with Tintin, Carreidas, and companions finally catching flight 714 to Sydney.
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