Quatermass plans to use an invention of Roney's, an "optic-encephalogram", to see these visions. The device will record impressions from the optical centres of the brain, in effect showing whatever the subject is seeing, hallucinatory or not. He wears the device and goes into the craft, but it is Roney's assistant, Barbara Judd, who is affected most. Placing the device on her, they record what she "sees"—a violent, bloody purge of the Martian hive, to root out unwanted mutations.
Quatermass begins to have a working theory as to what is going on. He believes that in its most primitive phase mankind was visited by this race. Some humans were taken away and genetically altered to have special abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis and other psychic powers. They were then brought back to Earth — the buried artefact was one of the return ships that had crashed. The idea was that, with their home world dying, the aliens had tried to change humanity's ancestors to have minds and abilities like theirs, created in their own mental image, but with a bodily form adapted to Earth. In effect, humanity are the Martians.
However, the plan was a partial failure: the aliens died out before completing their work, and as the human race bred and further evolved, only a percentage of it retained these abilities, with even these only surfacing sporadically. For centuries the buried ship itself had been occasionally triggering these dormant abilities. This explained the reports of poltergeists, people were unknowingly using their own telekinesis to move objects around them, the ghost sightings being traces of a race memory. It also explained the history of witchcraft and why people attributed it to a being they identified as the devil; the pentagram would have been the symbol for this alien race.
The government authorities, and Breen in particular, find this explanation preposterous despite being shown the recording of Barbara's vision. They believe that the craft is actually a Nazi propaganda weapon and the alien bodies fakes designed to create exactly the impressions that Quatermass has come to. They attribute the vision to an overactive imagination, and intend to hold a media event to halt the rumours that are already flitting through the population. However, Quatermass realises that if these implanted psychic powers survive in the human race, there could also still be ingrained in us a compulsion to enact the "Wild Hunt" of a race purge. Quatermass is concerned that the memories encoded inside the ship, which have already been picked up by sensitive people near it, will trigger that impulse and that those affected will begin to slaughter their own.
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