DESPITE THERE BEING ACTUAL ALIENS ATTACKING THEM ...
This never made sense to me - how people treated him like a conspiracy nut, even when they were looking for pilots for the final attack. Obviously he's not crazy at all.
Earlier they tried to dismiss Area 51 with a smirk as if it was ridiculous, while Alien ships were blowing up the entire country...
I thought the same thing myself, these people who didn't believe him HAVE SEEN THE ALIENS WITH THEIR OWN EYES, yet they STILL ridicule him???
shareyou're right
shareI imagine there's some sort of cognitive dissonance going on. Russell has always been the "village idiot" for lack of a better term. For years, he's just the crazy drunk talking crazy talk about alien abductions.
Now that they see the aliens for themselves, reality now conflicts with their preconceived notions. In that situation, though confronted with obvious and irrefutable evidence, it is still difficult to release those preconceived notions instantly and 100%.
To them Russell was still just the crazy village idiot.
Pretty good summation.
They were looking at Russell like he was a drunk. Which he was. In the original script they turned him down because he was drunk. Then he stole a missile, tied it to his biplane and did his kamikaze. Test audiences didn’t like it because it indicated that he was always going to suicide. They digitized it out and reshot with him in the jet to give him a hero’s farewell.
shareWell, he actually was a crazy drunk who believed every conspiracy theory out there, the fact that he had his facts once doesn't make him sane. Or reliable.
They looked at him like a drunk, which he was.
And it's possible that he is still a nut. Just because aliens have actually now arrived doesn't necessarily mean he was actually abducted years ago. It's not like no one ever talked about aliens or being abducted before.