"People who believe in flying saucers are the scrapings from the bottom"
About this Quote
It lands like a slap because it wants to. Kneale isn’t merely disagreeing with UFO believers; he’s policing the borders of respectable thought, treating credulity as a kind of social waste product. “Scrapings from the bottom” is contempt engineered into metaphor: the stuff you don’t even bother to name, what’s left after anything valuable has been skimmed off. The phrase denies individuality, debate, even curiosity. It turns a belief into a stain.
That brutality makes sense coming from a writer whose best work (especially Quatermass) made a career out of exploiting public fascination with science, invasion, and mass panic while refusing to romanticize it. Postwar Britain was soaked in technological awe and technological dread: atomic power, rockets, new media, a newly enlarged public sphere hungry for sensation. Flying saucers, in that landscape, weren’t just a quirky hobby; they were a symptom of the way modernity scrambles authority. If experts can’t keep up with the pace of change, conspiracy and cosmic fantasy rush in to offer coherence.
Kneale’s subtext is also a jab at the machinery that profits from gullibility: tabloids, opportunists, and a culture industry that packages paranoia as entertainment. The irony is that he benefited from the same appetite for speculative thrills. The quote reads, then, as both disgust and self-defense: a genre insider insisting his stories are cautionary, not an open invitation to abandon reason.
That brutality makes sense coming from a writer whose best work (especially Quatermass) made a career out of exploiting public fascination with science, invasion, and mass panic while refusing to romanticize it. Postwar Britain was soaked in technological awe and technological dread: atomic power, rockets, new media, a newly enlarged public sphere hungry for sensation. Flying saucers, in that landscape, weren’t just a quirky hobby; they were a symptom of the way modernity scrambles authority. If experts can’t keep up with the pace of change, conspiracy and cosmic fantasy rush in to offer coherence.
Kneale’s subtext is also a jab at the machinery that profits from gullibility: tabloids, opportunists, and a culture industry that packages paranoia as entertainment. The irony is that he benefited from the same appetite for speculative thrills. The quote reads, then, as both disgust and self-defense: a genre insider insisting his stories are cautionary, not an open invitation to abandon reason.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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