The Flight Of The Vavigator

David Scott Freeman (Joey Cramer) is an average 12-year-old American boy living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1978. On the night of July 4, his parents (Veronica Cartwright and Cliff DeYoung) ask him to retrieve his younger brother Jeff (Albie Whitaker) from a friend's house on the other side of the woods behind his house. While in the woods, David falls down an embankment into a ravine and isknocked unconscious. He awakes after what seems like a few moments, only to find that he is now in the year 1986, and that everything but David himself has changed. The police take David to a house where he is reunited with his family, now aged by 8 years. The shock of it all causes him to pass out.
Meanwhile, an extraterrestrial spacecraft has crashed into some power lines. NASA agents convincethe police that the craft is theirs and take it to their base, intending to study it, but find the ship seamless and impenetrable. In the meantime, David is taken to the hospital for a medical examination and to discover why he has not aged. The doctors begin performing tests on his brain and find it containing accurate information pertinent to the alien spacecraft that is at the NASA base; alertedto this fact, NASA operative Dr. Faraday (Howard Hesseman) requests David to be taken to the next NASA facility (the same place where the UFO is kept) to unravel the truth behind this. Further scans reveal that David's brain contains alien data and star charts leading to an alien planet named Phaelon, 560 light-years from Earth. The concept of time dilation due to faster-than-lightspeed travel isbelieved to explain why David has not aged significantly during his 8-year absence.
David befriends an intern named Carolyn McAdams (Sarah Jessica Parker), telling her to let his parents know that the institute plans to keep him longer than the promised 48 hours. The next morning, David hears a voice calling to him telepathically. He escapes the room by hiding in a service robot and is taken tothe hangar where the ship is stored. Once inside the ship, he meets its robotic pilot, an artificial intelligence calling itself a Trimaxian Drone Ship from the planet Phaelon, whom David subsequently nicknames Max (voiced by Paul Mall). Referring to David as "Navigator", Max accepts David's command to escape the base.
The ship takes off from the NASA facility and subsequently hides on the oceanfloor of the Gulf of Mexico. Max informs David that his mission was to travel the galaxy, collect biological specimens and take them back to his home planet of Phaelon for analysis before returning them to the place and time from which they were taken. Max's sensors had discovered that humans only use 10% of their brain, and as an experiment, David's brain was filled with miscellaneousinformation, including star charts. Max then returned David to Earth, but did not take him back to his proper time, fearing that humans were too delicate to survive time travel. When trying to leave Earth and return to Phaelon, Max accidentally crashed the ship into a power line, erasing from the ship's computer all the star charts and data necessary to return home. Max therefore needs the information placedin David's brain to complete his mission and return to Phaelon.
Max prepares to perform an encephalic scan on David, during which he shows him the remaining alien specimen he has yet to return to their homeworlds. David bonds with a Puckmaren, a small and harmless alien species and the last of his kind, since his homeworld was destroyed. After a while, Max performs the scan, but in the processalso contracts the ability to feel and express emotions, making him more human-like in behavior, but also more erratic, stubborn and argumentative.
David and Max start bickering as to their next course of action, to which Max's response is to shut down and allow the ship to fall from its orbit, taunting David to execute his title as navigator for real. David manages to activate the manual...