By Charles Lear
This is the last of what has turned into a five-part series looking into the events that led up to, and the people who would become involved with the television production UFO Cover-Up? Live!, which aired on October 14, 1988. It seems that the show’s producer, Michael Seligman, believed that it would be the vehicle for an earth-shaking UFO disclosure. What resulted was a clumsy and awkward production where the only disclosure anyone remembers is that aliens like strawberry ice cream.
Robert Skvaria wrote a three-part series of articles titled, “The Cover-Up Behind UFO Cover-Up? Live!” for Diabolique magazine, the first of which was posted on May 17, 2022. Skvaria spoke to Curtis Brubaker, who came up with the idea for the show, and Tracy Tormé, who produced the segment of the show devoted to the Gulf Breeze, Florida, sightings and the pictures taken by Ed Walters.
According to Skvaria, Brubaker was an industrial designer who worked as a special effects coordinator on the late 1970s T.V. show, Project U.F.O. He was driving in Los Angeles with his wife, and they were listening to a radio show that had Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera on as guests. Brubaker told Skvaria, “I listened carefully to all the stuff they were saying and told my wife, ‘If all this shit is going on, these abductions and all this stuff, somebody ought to file a lawsuit and take [the government] to court. We ought to get some expert witnesses and find out what the hell is really going on,’ because this is an invasion of Americans’ privacy.”
Instead of taking the GOVERNMENT to court, Brubaker came up with the idea for UFO Cover-Up? Live! and pitched it to LBS Communications, which had just had great success with The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults in 1986, and Return to the Titanic: Live, in 1987.
Brubaker suggested Tracy Tormé to produce the Gulf Breeze segment. Tormé, a T.V. producer and member of the Writer’s Guild, was quite familiar with the UFO subject and has described his interest as “lifelong.” Bill Moore was a friend of Tormé’s, and it was arranged that Moore and Shandera would appear as guests on the show.
According to Skvaria “problems appeared from day one.” The two men who had produced the specials on Al Capone’s vaults and the Titanic were busy with a follow-up to the Titanic special. A low-level producer, Michael Seligman, was the only one from the former two specials available, and he “by all accounts” was not very familiar with the subject of UFOs.
The Writer’s Guild was on strike at the time, but Seligman found a willing scab in the person of Barry Taff. Taff’s only production credit was as a consultant for the 1982 supernatural horror film The Entity (he actually investigated the case on which it is based) and his experience as a writer consisted of writing articles on UFOs and the paranormal for magazines. He was let go early on and Tormé told Skvaria that the production staff pressured him to write but he refused.
Taff wrote articles for UFO Magazine, and not long after the show aired, editor Vickie Cooper posted a first–hand account written by Taff (Taff later denied writing it) on UFOBBS (UFO Bulletin Board System).
Taff (we’re going with the idea that it was Taff) described that the opportunity to work with “UFO consultants such as William Moore, Jaime Shandera and Stanton Friedman,” was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
According to Taff, rumors started circulating that the show was being influenced “by insiders who were supposedly government intelligence officers from such agencies as CIA, NSA or even MJ-12.” Some of the creative staff found this comical and someone made up cards ranging from MJ-1 to MJ-12 and taped them to the desks of the production staff.
Taff describes “the first dark clouds” appearing after “the producer” (Seligman is not mentioned by name throughout) started having meetings with “Condor” and “Falcon.” He describes him becoming so paranoid that he became irrational and that his “incredible indecisiveness drove the creative staff to distraction.”
In the article by Robbie Graham, “The Tom Delonge Delusion,” posted November 15, 2016, on Mysterious Universe, Tormé is quoted giving his version of what happened: “Bill Moore wanted to get involved in the project because he’d heard all about it. So he came in and it was very, very cloak and dagger. He insisted on meeting the producers behind closed doors, and they couldn’t tell any of us what they had discussed. Before long, Moore flew the producers out to an island in the middle of the Great Lakes where he introduced them to his inside informants, ‘Falcon’ (Doty, not Rositzke) and ‘Condor’ (Robert Collins).”
Tormé also describes Seligman as becoming irrational. One of the decisions Seligman made, which Tormé considered irrational, was insisting that the entire show be scripted and that everyone read off cue cards. This made for some very awkward moments during the airing, as some of the guests were quite inept at this.
When the show went live, Mike Farrell, of M.A.S.H. fame, was the hapless host and he made a heroic effort. He didn’t lose his cool even when he was working with a live feed with a bad delay to Russia to talk to two Russian researchers Moore was in touch with. Not only were they bad at cue cards, they were bad at English.
There are squeaky chair noises and noises from off camera which add to the amateurish quality of the show. There were also phone numbers the viewers could call for a charge of one dollar to report close encounters from level one to four, recommend whether or not Congress should look into UFOs, or report that they’d had no UFO experiences.
One moment that raised some eyebrows was during an “interview” with former Pentagon Spokesman and Chief of Public Information for the Air Force William Coleman. Coleman describes having seen a silver 70-foot disk in 1955 while flying a B-25 over Alabama. According to the thread “The mysterious tale of William T Coleman – ex Project Blue Book ‘spokesman’ and UFO experiencer” on the Above Top Secret forum, Coleman had come forward with this story on the Merv Griffin Show in 1978.
After all the lead-up stories and discussion, when it was time for the big reveal, viewers were shown two GOVERNMENT insiders, identified as “Falcon” and “Condor” with their faces in shadow and their voices electronically altered. Farrell acts as if he’s actually talking to Falcon but, according to Skvaria, he had been recorded in 1983 for a CBS 60 Minutes segment that never aired. Peter Leone, identified on the show as the “executive producer of news for the CBS station in Los Angeles,” states that he had met and verified the identity of Falcon in 1983 and 1987.
There have been disagreements as to who these men were, but Robert Collins stated that he was Condor and that Doty was “Falcon” in the 2005 book he and Doty co-authored with Timothy Good, The Black World of UFOs: Exempt from Disclosure. Although Doty has continually denied he was Falcon, he is listed as Falcon in the cast list for the show on IMBD and Condor is anonymous.
Doty declares that there is one alien guest in the U.S. at that time as part of an exchange program, and that there had been three since 1948-49. The first one was held captive after a crash in New Mexico and the second was also part of an exchange program. His description is much like that of the iconic grey alien. He says that there are both males and females, and that they have four fingers with no thumbs. He says they eat vegetables, enjoy ancient Tibetan music and that their favorite snack is strawberry ice cream.
Because of these and other ridiculous statements made throughout the show, such as Stanton Friedman stating that he and his fellow researchers could prove that there was a crash at Roswell that was covered up and that alien bodies were recovered and taken away for autopsies, there was speculation that the GOVERNMENT used the show as a disinformation vehicle. According to Skvaria, Seligman has denied that there was any interference from the intelligence community.
There’s a chapter in Jim Moseley’s 2002 book, Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-robbing Ufologist, regarding the Air Force’s UFO policy titled, “Planned Confusion or Pure Stupidity?” As we have been trying to stick to the principle of parsimony throughout this series, if one applies that question to UFO Cover-Up? Live!, the simplest answer is to be preferred.
Thanks to Curt Collins and Kevin Randle for their comments and insight.