An extraterrestrial, then, descendant of a flying saucer pilot?
No, not that either.
I put my face in my hands. Oh for the love of God, what am I then? What am I?
I knew I wasn't a man and I didn't know what I was.
The thing that was me, that had lain dormant until twenty-six hours before, and then had waked and taken over its rightful inheritance which was my body and my mind, what was it?
I didn't know what it was. But I knew a few things about it. It had once crouched in a cave with others of its breed, to listen to the angry yelling of hunting men. It had once stolen a human she and mated with her, and been killed by her treachery. It was master to an incredible degree of its sense and muscular equipment, even of its heart, which it could slew at will, and of its breathing, which it could stop entirely for fantastic periods of time.
It was rising in me now and it was I. Remorse died forever. Human traits and sentiments died that I could no longer remember ever harboring. I was I and though I did not yet know exactly what I was, I knew it was no fit of madness that had taken possession of me, no devil of the olden times to be driven out by exorcism, no second personality to land me in an asylum; but the soul that had come down through untold centuries hidden in my genes, traveling its recondite course through blood and flesh and brain matter until it woke again to conscious life in Bill Cuff in the early autumn of 1952.
The pictures I had seen thus far were racial memory, remembrance of a dawn world, and I knew there would be more of them. I would hold patience in my hands and wait till time brought full recall.