But Farrell, host of UFO COVERUP LIVE in 1989, says 'Falcon' and 'Condor' were disinformation agents
6/23/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
How many of you remember the TV UFO special of 1989 called UFO COVERUP LIVE, sponsored by a collection of huge corporations, a sort of "who's who" of the Establishment, including AT&T? AlienZoo fans in their early twenties were barely into their teens when the special ran nationwide. The pre-show hype had us expect that it might just convince the disbelievers at long last.
Anticipation ran high. Promotions for the show were everywhere, as we waited to see the LIVE connection they promised with a prominent Soviet ufologist, who would announce on U.S. TV that Soviet scientists accepted the ET presence, and that many UFOs are ETs interstellar vehicles. Mike Farrell was the master of ceremonies of the show that was produced by Tracy Torme. The cast was a showcase of many of the best-known faces in ufology at that time. While the subject of Area 51, at that time, was not a "mainstream" topic, the program did tackle everything from the mysterious 1908 Soviet explosion at Tunguska, to Roswell, MJ-12, cattle mutilations, and even supposed secret landings by aliens at certain military bases, including Holloman Air Force Base. In fact, the case for the Holloman landing was quite well presented by documentary producer Robert Emenneger and Air Force audio-visual specialist Paul Shartle. These men made a persuasive case that the Air Force actually filmed a real alien landing at the Holloman base, but more about that some other week.
Whenever a show promises that much, Murphy's 3rd Law of Disinformation suggests that it simply MUST include something that casts doubt on all that blazing TRUTH breaking through. In UFO COVERUP LIVE, it was the silhouetted, electronically filtered voice testimony by two supposed U.S. intelligence agents (called "Falcon" and "Condor") that pushed the show over the top. Curiously, the story they told might actually have been founded in fact -- that a living alien, EBE-1 (an extraterrestrial biological entity, or "Grey") survived a UFO crash in the Southwest, and that EBE-1 provided incredible information to our government in utmost secrecy. Many of the things claimed about EBE-1 proved to be a very tall order for the American (and world) public to swallow. But then Falcon and Condor mentioned that EBE had specific food preferences during his stay here on earth, and one of his favorite foods was STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM. And that was the cold lump in the throat that people just couldn't swallow at all.
That one remark brought on the laughter, smirks, and winks. The show is remembered as THE STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM UFO SHOW. It made no difference how many facts about the coverup had just been laid bare. It made no difference that Linda Moulton Howe made persuasive arguments for alien involvement in cattle mutilations, or that William Moore, Jaime Shandera, and Stanton Friedman made a convincing case that the Roswell incident really was the crash of an ET UFO. After the strawberry ice cream comment, most of the viewers cracked up with laughter. It turned delicate secret realities into the "absurd," and most viewers walked away feeling they had just been "had", and that good ol' Mike Farrell had just put one over on them big time, with help from AT&T.
So it is with disinformation. Like with pepper -- a little bit goes a long way. And a few too many shakes can spoil a French chef's greatest banquet.
All of this was very much on my mind when I ran into Mike Farrell the other day at a very interesting event, and we had a chance to re-visit some of his memories of UFO COVERUP LIVE. He shrugged it off when I brought it up. He gave me an "oh that one!" expression. He would have much preferred to talk about PROVIDENCE. But I told him I could not shrug off UFO COVERUP LIVE -- that it played a very large role in shaping the formative UFO beliefs of millions of people.
My encounter with Mike Farrell happened on Saturday, June 10th, during an interesting book signing gathering at the house of a famous Hollywood director and his wife, Dan and Dorothea Petri. Their lovely Brentwood home hosted a small celebration on the occasion of the publication of actress Jane Alexander.s recent book, COMMAND PERFORMANCE: AN ACTRESS IN THE THEATER OF POLITICS. She has been at the forefront of defending the National Endowment for the Arts against the budget slashing by the Republican-controlled Congress. Her book details the upsetting machinations of the battle that ensued, in the aftermath of the Maplethorpe controversy. That was when the NEA was gutted for political reasons after it had unwittingly "promoted" art with what was considered homo-erotic and anti-religious themes.
Then I spotted Mike Farrell and struck up a conversation about UFO COVERUP LIVE.
Try to visualize what was going on in the world, ufologically-speaking, in the few years leading up to UFO COVERUP LIVE being broadcast. It was a time of big events on the UFO disclosure stage. Whitley Strieber's book, COMMUNION, detailing the series of alien abductions his family experienced in upstate New York, was holding fast to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, week after week. Budd Hopkins jolted us with INTRUDERS, introducing "missing fetus" incidents as an integral part of many UFO abductions. Aliens not only intruded people's homes, but it appeared they were out to take unborn babies. In some cases, it appeared that perhaps the visitors from beyond were responsible for those pregnancies in the first place -- human hybrids were being bred to populate other planets in the universe.
And that wasn't all. Captain Terauchi, of Japan Airlines Flight 1647, over Alaska, claimed to see a huge cube-shaped alien mother ship as he headed toward Anchorage, and FAA radar reports backed up his claim that something anomalous was up there. That is, they backed him up until debunker Phil Klass began investigating, and decided Captain Terauchi merely saw the planet Jupiter. Klass also said the radar reports no longer contained the data first reported. The data "disappeared" after Mr. Klass entered the case.
Also at that time, the MJ-12 documents were huge news in ufological circles. The purported briefing documents to President Eisenhower (including a Truman letter to Secretary of Defense Forrestal about forming MJ-12) had not yet been dissected by analysts who later found many flaws. When a false Truman signature and a non-existent Presidential Executive Order number showed up in the documents, it took the wind out of the sails. But for one brief and shining moment, it looked like the smoking gun on UFOs was at long last out in the open. MJ-12 appeared to be very strong evidence that a flying saucer crashed at Roswell, and that the government had a top secret "control group" in place to distort, camouflage, and spin the information, so as not to upset the public with the facts about visitng ETs.
Those were heady times, as we used to say. At the forefront, for a few years, was a man who has all but vanished from the ufology scene, one William Moore, co-author of the first book on the Roswell case, titled THE ROSWELL INCIDENT, which he wrote with Charles Berlitz. It was Moore's associate, Jaime Shandera, who received the mysterious and cataclysmic MJ-12 documents -- or at least the photo negatives of those documents, which was all that was released to civilian researchers. Recently, the plot has thickened, because insiders delivered ORIGINAL MJ-12 documents to researchers. Some of these "old, original" documents may be disinformation, but others appear to be absolutely real, as nuclear physicist/UFO lecturer Stanton Friedman and the father-son team of Bob and Ryan Wood purport. They have now submitted the documents to forensic tests (www.majesticdocuments.com).
At that time, Bill Moore published a regular UFO newsletter, in which he told the world about THE AVIARY -- a group of intelligence agents who, he claimed, took the names of various birds for identification. Two of his key contacts to this group, Moore explained, were called Falcon and Condor. The testimony of these "inside" agents was mind-boggling.
You can't imagine how all of this played into my life back then. In 1987 I had a sighting in broad daylight of a flying saucer at close range, near my house. Then, within a year of that sighting, Don Schmitt, head of Special Investigations for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, visited me several times as he tried to pry into the Falcon and Condor mystery.
Moore had "sensitive" videotape of Falcon and Condor's testimony, which painted a picture of reality very much like what Bob Lazarclaimed. Falcon and Condor vouched for the fact that the government had secret dealings with ETs for decades, and that a living alien (EBE-1) communicated much information about interstellar travel and humankind's history. Our "secret history," according to EBE-1, included the fact that we are a species created by aliens via genetic manipulation of primitive hominids. It also included the notion that thousands of years ago, aliens "staged" religion as we know it, including the Biblical miracles, to manage and direct the development of our species. EBE-1, similar to what we think of as a Grey alien, was said to have come from a star system known as Zeta-Reticula, a double star on a "trade route" with Earth.
At first, the wonders unveiled by Falcon and Condor seemed almost credible to many, given how the information overlapped with all the other ufological news that I cited at the outset. And then, this hush-hush data and testimony suddenly burst into the national media in the much maligned, but historically trail-blazing TV documentary titled UFO COVERUP LIVE, hosted by actor Mike Farrell.
The producer of UFO COVERUP LIVE, Tracy Torme, is the son of the recently deceased singer Mel Torme. A personal friend of ufologist Jacques Vallee, Tracy Torme created and produced the popular science-fiction series, SLIDERS, and was a bright, shining star in ufology for many years. After producing UFO COVERUP LIVE, he went on to write the screenplay for FIRE IN THE SKY, the taut and by-and-large convincing drama based on the Travis Walton abduction case. Torme also scripted the mini-series, INTRUDERS, loosely based on Budd Hopkins's book and research. He also knew Bill Moore rather well and met some members of the Aviary, including Falcon and Condor. The rest of us would never get to see Falcon and Condor "in the flesh." As I said, in the TV show (as in the private interview tapes they'd done for Bill Moore) these two "secret government agents" appeared only in silhouette, with electronically filtered voices. Their true identities were being protected.
I wanted to know what Mike Farrell thought about the material contained in UFO COVERUP LIVE from the vantagepoint of a decade later. His first comment was that he regretted the show had been so stilted, so overly scripted. He stated that when he heard the witnesses tell their stories, they sounded very natural and convincing. However, the show relied heavily on tele-prompters, which made some mind-boggling claims sound flat and unpersuasive. It was clear he did, however, find it persuasive that there is a UFO coverup, and that much of what was presented was compelling to him.
However, when we got to the subject of Falcon and Condor, Mike Farrell stated what I already heard on the rumor mill -- that at least one of them was later shown up to be "not who he claimed to be" and something of a fraud. Rumor has it that one of these two Aviary members was Richard Doty of Kirtland Air Force Base, who gained a reputation in the early 1990s as notorious for putting out false information about UFOs, as well as some bogus documents. After this became public knowledge, he was deprived of his position at Kirtland. I am not sure of all the circumstances, apart from the fact that Linda Moulton Howe branded him a liar because he denied showing her a "President Carter UFO Briefing Document" that she swears he showed her.
In 1989, at the MUFON Conference in Las Vegas, Bill Moore gave his public swan song to ufology. He admitted having been involved with Doty in spreading certain UFO disinformation. The purpose, he explained, was to see how the information would be disseminated within the UFO research community. They wanted to know where the information would show up, who would believe it, and how it would be distorted along the way, from its original "release." Moore even admitted to having spied for Air Force Intelligence -- spied on some of his fellow ufologists -- all because he was so eager for any "crumbs" of real information he might get in the process. He regretted that he betrayed his own principles. In later years, ufologist and prolific author Capt. Kevin Randle of the Air Force Reserve (in intelligence) accused Moore of being the one who "hoaxed" the MJ-12 documents. Randle's claim was only convincing to his most devoted adherents, but it was staggering how completely Bill Moore then VANISHED from the field that had become his life-blood. It is claimed by some that when the Air Force put out its "Project Mogul" explanation for the Roswell Incident, Bill Moore accepted it and stated that he no longer believed Roswell was best explained by an extraterrestrial crashed spaceship. To those who believe the Roswell evidence and the copious testimony from so many honest military men (who claim ET bodies WERE recovered from a spaceship), Moore's statement (if in fact he really made it) was seen as a final cop-out and sell-out to "the other side."
The deeper one digs, the murkier THE TRUTH becomes in ufology. It twists and turns and changes shape. Yesterday's truth is tomorrow's lie. Tomorrow's truth is yesterday's lie. For Mike Farrell, it is sufficient to conclude that the official TRUTH, which claims that no UFOs are ET spacecraft, is a lie. But he's not about to accept the strawberry ice cream story, which turned his show into a laughingstock that he has since wanted to forget -- and he rejects most of what Falcon and Condor had to say because he doesn't think they were credible.
Well, at least they didn't claim EBE-1 smoked Marlboros. Then, instead of the Marlboro Man, we'd have had to get used to the Marlboro Humanoid.
Note that we adapted the EBE-1 story in our film ROSWELL, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Martin Sheen, and Dwight Yoakam. However, as Martin Sheen TOLD Kyle MacLachlan that part of the story, it was presented as though it might well have been disinformation. "Go tell it to the New York Times," Sheen said. "Be my guest. I hope they believe you. But you have nothing."
We might have nothing, but now Sheen has the role of President. I'm waiting for the episode of WEST WING when Martin Sheen makes a UFO expose like he did in ROSWELL the movie. Then he'll get my vote as the next actor who should be President. With all respect to Mr. Reagan, I think Sheen would out-shine him. And he certainly would "out" the UFO subject faster than Mr. Reagan did, if we're to judge by his contribution to ROSWELL.
This is FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD signing off until we meet again, same time, same Website, next Friday. Be there or beware.