[citation needed] Broadcast of a murder mystery film starring Loni Anderson,[3] titled Without Warning, is interrupted with a news bulletin of a series of three earthquakes, one of them located in the Thunder Basin National Grassland area of Wyoming.

[4] The film resumes but a few moments later is interrupted for good as coverage, led by Sander Vanocur and Dr. Caroline Jaffe, begins of a worldwide impact event.

At the same time, a power surge is detected in the devoutly religious community of Faith, Wyoming, less than 50 miles from the Thunder Basin impact site.

Scientist Dr. Avram Mandel, who has been studying the impacts, is flown by an F-16 to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where reporters are being briefed on the latest incident.

Mandel resigns from NASA and reveals to reporters that three more asteroids, each at least two miles wide, will soon impact Washington, D.C., Moscow, and Beijing, the capital cities of the only three nations capable of first-strike nuclear warfare.

This, combined with the casting of Jane Kaczmarek, a recognizable actress, as well as several other well-known performers in secondary roles (Star Trek: The Next Generation guest star John de Lancie as a reporter and Philip Baker Hall as one of the doctors in the space station), was expected to alleviate any concerns that the story being shown was actually happening.

Ron Canada, who appeared in the film as a science author being interviewed by Sander Vanocur, had previously worked as a television news reporter for stations in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. during the 1970s before becoming an actor.

The producers used actual CBS News graphics to help accentuate the feeling that it was real (though they used a different network logo, a sphere within an outline of a TV screen), however, leading to at least one uproar over the events.

In several other markets, including Detroit, Michigan, and San Diego, California, the local CBS affiliates (respectively, WJBK, which would switch to Fox six weeks later, and KFMB-TV) refused to air this TV movie.