In 2018, Roswell does appear in a bad shape, but let's face it, 1) the perspective of having a saucer from outer space retrieved in New Mexico in July 1947 and stored in Area 51 never really had a high probability, and 2) even if this had been the case, the prospects of having it disclosed as a result of a campaign to petition the authorities to «reveal the truth» were even lower.
However, I agree with Randle that, if a crash of a spacecraft appears now remote*, the mystery of what happened remains complete. The problem is less why Marcel came with such a strange and seemingly nonsensical story. Personally, I believe that he was not legit, and I suspect that he was involved in a manipulation. Afeter all, as a man with a military intelligence background, he knew where his loyalties lied. But if Roswell were used as a decoy to send ufologists on a wild goose chase, why the Roswell AAF base issued the announcement remains as obscure as before.
I ended up accepting the Project Mogul (super-secret barometric sensor balloon array) explanation, based on not only the revelations surfacing at the time but also certain documentation and conversations with second-generation* informants above and beyond what was reported in the daily and UFO press of the time.
* By 'second-generation', I mean discussions with colleagues at a key site mentioned in the mythos who'd received their info from folks who'd been on-site (and positioned to need to know) in 1947.
Much of the authorities' confusing statements and behavior Randle cites is (IMHO) entirely understandable in light of:
- The security / classification level at which Project Mogul had operated;
- The fact the USAF had no substantial involvement save for providing a launch facility for the balloon arrays, because ...
- It was a CIA, rather than DOD, project - a fact to which more folks should pay attention.
IMHO the main thing getting covered up in 1947 was the left hand / right hand disconnects between the military and intelligence organizations involved, and the embarrassing situation in which the military ones had been left by virtue of having been the ones who'd publicly spoken first, without really knowing what they were showing.
If there would be only one Roswell theory that is completely discredited, it is the Mogul one. Its involvment in the Roswell controversy made that despite its minor importance, the Mogul project has been studied from every angle. Not only the theory does not account for many anomalies in the reaction of the military, but no evidence for a Mogul flight remains, while there is an impressive amount of counter-evidence against it.
Nor the material nor the balloons themselves were classified, and it seems that not even the namewas. There was no attempt to impose any secrecy on the recoveries of the wrecked flights. In fact, from early July, tags with a return adress had been attached to the material... However, balloons and the material themselves were not deemed as important enough to be systemativally looked for, even if the Mogul staff tried to track some of the flights by radar. We know that the Air Force staff, including at Roswell, was informed of the existence of the balloons, as Charles Moore had met them, and notably Jesse Marcel, to ask for their help to retrieve the wreckage – which, incidentally, makes not plausible that the Roswell staff was surprised by the remains they found near the Brazel ranch. The cavalier way with which the recovery of the wrecks was handled, with no hint of an attempt at cover-up, corroborates that there was no secrecy attached to the material. What we had was ordinary weather balloons, that Marcel would have recognized as such (and even if he may have wondered at a new model, 30 years later, he would have already understood ages ago what had been going on).
There is also a complete lack of description of any component of a Mogul flight, from military or civilian witnesses. And last but not least, the files from the project Mogul show that no Mogul flight was retrieved from the surroundings of Corona at the time of the incident. The convoluted attempts by Charles Moore to rewrite the official contemporary reports could not change anything to the observation.
The crash of a top secret aircraft or balloon, or a failed expermiment, may account for all or some of the incident. But we must look elsewhere.
* Nonetheless, I would not include the McCoy letter as a definitive evidence. McCoy may have been involved in the study of foo fighters, but despite that we know that there were studies of anomalous aerial phenomenas in the immediate after-war, we still don't know precisely which kind of projects were involved, with which level of security. He may have been left out of the loop.