In The Tommyknockers, the alien object is buried near Haven, Maine. Haven is the small community whose residents gradually fall under the spacecraft's influence.
The discovery begins when Roberta “Bobbi” Anderson, a writer of Western fiction, trips over a metal protrusion in the woods near town. She and her friend Gard Gardner excavate it and realize that the object is part of a huge, long-buried alien spacecraft. Once exposed, the ship releases an invisible influence that alters Haven's inhabitants, giving them bursts of inventive intelligence while weakening their judgment and humanity.
Haven is easy to confuse with other Stephen King locations, especially Derry, Castle Rock, and Jerusalem's Lot. Those towns belong to King's broader fictional geography, but they are not the setting of this novel's buried spacecraft. The town's isolation is essential to the plot: the affected residents become increasingly dependent on their inventions and hostile toward outsiders, allowing the alien influence to spread largely unnoticed until the crisis reaches its final stage.