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July 26, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:39
Edition 63 - Howard Hughes

Hear a very special take on the secret life of Billionaire Howard Hughes…

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for returning to the website and the show, and thank you very much for all your emails that have come in.
Thank you to Catherine in Canada for a very considered email.
Catherine, thank you.
Please stay in touch.
Thank you to Stuart at Kircody in Scotland.
Stuart is going to New York, and I know you're going to enjoy it, one of my favorite cities on this planet.
I miss the place like crazy.
You are going to love it.
Occasionally, I think you might miss Kirkhoddy, but New York is a fabulous experience.
And thank you for the nice things you said about the show.
And if you've emailed, thank you to you.
I'm going to get back to you individually.
When I can, I will also mention more of your emails in the next edition.
But we've got to push on with this one because we've got a lot to get through.
Thank you for your response to Mark L. Cowden, the edition before last that was.
He is the guy who says that he'd recorded a conversation between this world and the next world, which he says had never been done before.
I found him a great guest, and so did you.
Controversial guest was Jim Maroney.
He was the last one, the alien abductee in Canada.
He says, you've had a lot of thoughts about that.
Some of you love his story.
Some of you think it's highly improbable.
Mark Taos emailed, Mark, thank you for your email with one suggestion about that.
And Mark, I completely understand.
The fact of the matter is, we're never really, unless the aliens write to us or appear in person on this show, we're never going to be able to verify that.
And even then, if they came on this show, there would still be people who say, that's just a fake and a hoax.
But Jim Maroney tells a great story.
I found him a very compelling guest.
If it's all true, it's amazing.
If it isn't true, what was it?
Is the only question that I can ask.
But that was the last edition, and that certainly split you, but you did respond to it.
Please keep your emails coming in.
Keep your responses coming.
Go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
That's www.theunexplained.tv.
There you can send me feedback, guest suggestions, or even make a donation to the show.
Be very grateful for that.
And thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
I can say it, Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for putting the show together.
It's been a very, very long week.
It's been a very long three weeks or so.
In England, we've had this story that you couldn't make up.
That was one MP's verdict on it, and he was right.
You couldn't make this up.
We have the story of Rupert Murdoch, the most powerful media baron on the planet, being quizzed by MPs about alleged dirty deeds by his newspapers, certainly one of them, the news of the world.
He decides to close the newspaper after 168 years.
There is going to be a full judicial inquiry we hear today starting in September, which is going to be chaired by a judge who is a no-nonsense kind of guy who's asked the media to cooperate in this thing.
Rupert Murdoch gives evidence with his son James Murdoch before this big MP's committee in London.
He gets a custard pie in the face during the hearing.
How did that person get in?
How could that happen?
This story has more twists than turns than Hampton Court maze.
If you know Hampton Court in London, it's a big maze and it's got a lot of twists and turns.
So that's what I've been involved in over this last few weeks.
I think we all feel like we've been put through the ringer with so many stories and that terrible, terrible tragedy in Norway.
Anders Brevek, the man who's confessed to doing this, there will be more about that.
I'm sure.
A trial in due course.
A lot of heartache and a lot of sadness.
And my heart goes out to you if you're listening in Norway.
I know we do have listeners there.
A terrible thing to happen in a beautiful country.
And of course, the other story that's had the media occupied in the last few days has been another very sad one, the death of Amy Winehouse, somebody whose career I've followed because I've been on music radio stations for a lot of my career.
And I saw her start.
We kind of felt on the radio in London that we knew her because her dad, you know, was well known in London, Mitch.
Terrible story that she's now dead.
Such a talent, what a voice.
Only 27.
Maybe that's a subject for another show.
Right, let's get on to the guest for this show, a subject very, very close to my heart.
In fact, the guy who bore my name or whose name I bear, Howard Hughes, the famous eccentric multi-billionaire, and his strange story.
But there is a new book out, and the people who've researched and done this book say that the story we've been told about Howard Hughes and how he lived and died ain't true.
In fact, he lived a lot longer, and it was an even more secretive and strange life than you will ever, ever imagine.
Let's get him on right now.
He's one of the people behind the book, Boxes, The Secret Life of Howard Hughes.
His name is Mark Musick.
He's in the United States, and Mark, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Well, Howard, thank you very much for having me on your show.
Well, listen, I couldn't not have had you on my show for a couple of reasons.
Number one, the show is about the man whose name that I've borne all my years, and I've had to live with that for good and bad over these years, Howard Hughes.
And the other reason for it being the information about the book that you have created with a guy called Douglas Wellman on Howard Hughes.
And the information about it has a lead paragraph that sounds like a movie trailer.
And just, if you let me do it, Mark, I'm going to read it.
It says, an incredible story with the ingredients of fabulous wealth, a reclusive man unable to escape his famous life, assistance from the CIA providing an alternate identity, and a loving wife who knew how to keep secrets.
God, if that was a trailer in the movies, I'd have to go and see that movie.
Isn't that fabulous?
I would have absolutely no compunction but to go and see that movie.
If you wrote that, you are a genius, sir.
But amazing stuff.
All right, this is a book that you and a guy called Douglas Wellman have put together together.
Douglas was the author.
You were the researcher.
So you did the legwork on this thing.
And it has an amazing premise about Howard Hughes.
And the premise is that Howard Hughes did not die, as I, as a child in 1976, thought he did, but he went on and had a different life, another life.
So he had his life of achievement, his life of supposed reclusiveness or reclusivity, and then a life that was not like that at all.
That is a good place at which to start, but I don't want to go there just yet.
I want to talk first about Howard Hughes, about the character about the man, because I've been surprised to Hear that some of my colleagues didn't see the Leo DiCaprio movie and have no idea who Howard Hughes was.
So, can you tell us?
Okay, Howard Hughes was a very, very rich man.
In the 60s and the 70s, he was the richest man in America and maybe the richest man in the world, but he's a very reclusive man and a very private man.
Born in 1905, and his father was in the oil business, and his parents died very young.
His parents died in 1922 and 1924, and so he inherited an incredible wealth through his father's business at about the age of 19.
And he took that wealth and made movies with it, had a fabulous aviation career with it, built airplanes, bought hotels, casinos in Las Vegas, and was involved with many, many, many different businesses.
The mystery begins later in his life in the 50s when he just became very reclusive.
And the books describe him in the 60s and 70s as a confusing mystery man is how they're describing him.
In 72 and 73, particularly, there was just massive confusion as to what was going on in his life.
I remember all of that because we used to get that reported here in our newspapers, because you know we have tabloid newspapers in the UK, and they maybe go further even than the ones in the U.S. And all of this stuff used to appear all the time, and I would have to live through the fact that I would go to school, and somebody would say, there you are on the front page of the paper, and there it would be.
Howard Hughes does X, Y, or Z. A very peculiar character.
But wasn't the story that Howard Hughes, quite simply, wanted to be the best he possibly could in a whole variety of fields, including, I think I'm right in saying golf and movies and engineering and aviation.
He wanted to make planes.
He wanted to fly planes and be the best.
And he made a pledge about this huge aircraft that he created, the Spruce Goose.
And didn't he say that if this thing does not fly, which it didn't, you ain't ever going to hear from me again?
And he was true to his word.
Isn't it as simple as that?
Yes, the man was a genius.
He was an absolute genius.
And the Spruce Goose that he built, he was told it can't fly.
And actually, Eva McClellan, the woman who told me this story that I didn't believe for the first four years that she told me, and then as I put it together, it became very clear what was really going on.
She asked him, why did you go fly the Hercules?
Because he didn't really like the name Spruce Goose.
The media gave it that name, but he really didn't like it.
And he said, he responded to her as, I was told it would fly, and I wanted to prove that it would fly.
This was a matter of honor for him.
This guy, I think people misunderstand him who don't believe that he was a guy of complete honor, a man of his word.
And he gave his word, and he trusted people that this thing would be a viable flying machine.
And when that didn't happen, not only had he let himself down, he felt he'd let America down.
He was a hard worker.
As I said, the guy was a genius in many, many different areas.
And he was a hard worker.
The later years there, when he was living with Eva, he did his work through a group of aides that were helping him.
And so we can also visit about that because where the stand-in was...
He met a woman, Eva, that you talk about, who's told you her story, and that's why you've written this book, and had a completely alternative life that we know nothing about until now.
Correct.
That's exactly right.
And he hid away.
He hid away reclusive.
And we think they brought this stand in, the long-haired, long-fingernail gentleman who did die in 1976.
We believe he was probably just a homeless person in Las Vegas somewhere.
And they brought him in, and he was representing Howard from about 1969 on when Howard was totally living under another identity.
So the guy living in the hotel in Vegas with the long fingernails, the long hair, not seeing anybody, who we see in that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, the aviator, that wasn't Howard.
That is correct.
Actually, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie only goes into about the mid-50s.
It doesn't even try to explain the later years of life.
It doesn't even go there.
But that man, that long-haired, long-finged man that was described in the media was a stand-in.
That was not Howard Hughes.
Do you know anything about the stand-in?
We know very little about the stand-in, except that glimpses, again, through books and things, the stand-in in 1973 fell, and doctors came in, and he was a 90-pound, long-haired, long-fingernail guy with a broken hip now, declared mentally incompetent.
But they said that that stand-in, his age, would have been 20 years older than Howard's age at that point in time.
Okay, and that's why people used to say, we can't believe how terrible he looks now.
And people just thought it was because of his general degeneration, living alone like that and having all those hang-ups that he appeared to have.
And you're saying this is one great big hoax or joke by Howard Hughes?
I don't think it was a joke to Howard.
I think it was a way for Howard to escape.
And after all those years, though, why would he want to do that?
I can understand why he would want to go into hiding.
I don't understand why he would want to create an elaborate other person, other life in that way, and have to maintain that and keep secrecy around that.
That does not compute.
Yeah, that's a good question.
What we think in the 60s, when he started buying the hotels into Las Vegas and casinos, he could never escape.
He couldn't ever get away.
And he would even go into the hotels and be recognized there by the people there.
And so he could never go anywhere without being recognized.
And I think that was part of the issue that he wanted to get away from was just that identity that he could never escape from.
This gave him a way to escape from that.
But isn't the fact that he was so recognizable and that everybody knows Howard Hughes?
I can remember being a tiny, tiny boy, and they used to repeat shows called Roan and Martin's Laughing over here.
And they used to take the proverbial, as we say in the UK, out of Howard Hughes all the time.
They used to laugh about him and have jokes about him all the time.
He was one of the most recognizable people in America.
So having said that, and you've just said yourself that everybody knew him, I can't see how it would be possible for somebody so recognizable to put off or pull off a scam like that.
He changed his looks.
He changed his hair color.
And he might have had some plastic surgery done.
We're not sure about that.
But he also changed his eye color.
How do you know that?
Howard Hughes' eyes were dark.
There's only one or two books that says Howard Hughes' eyes were dark.
Nick's eyes were a brilliant blue color.
They were a blue color.
And we even said when you looked into his eyes, they reflected.
And they didn't look normal.
They reflected.
And so we believe in 1966, Howard went to Boston for some, the books call it eye trouble.
And we think that he had an experimental iris implant, blue.
And then people who interacted with him in Alabama, I talked to several people there, and they confirmed his eyes were just a brilliant blue color.
So he wanted to take on the look of a Scandinavian.
And that's how we tried to change his looks.
And then Eva kind of figured it out.
When Eva first met him in 69 and didn't know who he was, they were in Panama.
And he didn't know who he was.
She didn't know who he was.
But she knew there was something strange going on because he was always doing business with the group of AIDS.
And he was six foot four inches tall, handsome man, always doing business.
And as she got to know him a little bit more, it took her about three years to figure out what was really going on here.
And then he revealed it to her in 74, 75.
And she said, I knew it by then anyway.
I knew what was really going on there.
So she wasn't at all shocked.
I could imagine a lot of women, after three years with somebody, and they say, by the way, I'm really Howard Hughes, would just not buy that at all.
She knew Mystery with him.
They met in the first, it was in November of 69, and a casual meeting, you know, that type of thing.
And it got a little acquainted.
And then he just disappeared for two months, December 69, January 70.
And he came back to Panama.
This is now February 70.
And she said, while you were gone, I felt like I was being followed.
Oh, boy.
And his response was, you were being followed.
Which very much ties in with the stories of Howard used that we know, that he had connections all over the place.
He could afford big-time security.
Just one little aspect, though.
There's this guy living in Vegas, and there's Howard living wherever he's living.
Now, Vegas was run by the mob.
Did he do this in collusion with the mob?
I really don't know the connection with the mob.
I have no idea on that.
We've gotten no insight on that at all.
Howard did buy a bunch of his hotels and casinos from the mob in trying to raise the class of the entertainment in Las Vegas.
And so he purchased a lot of his hotels from the mob, but I have really no other knowledge of any other connections there.
Tell me about Eva.
Eva, lovely lady.
I met her in 2002, January 2002, and her husband, and she called him Nick, N-I-K, Nick, had just died in November 2001.
And she said, I have something I want to tell you.
And I said, okay.
She knew I was a general.
I was a major general in the Air Force.
And she said, there's something I want to tell you.
And I said, okay, Eva, what is it?
And she said, I was married to Howard Hughes.
And if somebody tells you that, what was your reaction?
Oh, my goodness.
I was just in shock.
It's kind of like, oh, my goodness, this woman's crazy.
She's just loony.
But you would say that, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
And I said, Eva, the Howard Hughes?
And she said, yes, the Howard Hughes.
And I said, well, Eva, Howard Hughes died 25 years ago.
And she said, that's what everyone wants you to think.
And as she started relaying this story to me, it was over a period of years, two to three years, that I would meet with her, listen to her story, even record it.
And the things I noticed in her story is nothing ever changed.
No dates, no conversations, no actual words.
Nothing ever changed in her story.
And as I went and tried to confirm it, go back to places that they live and try to confirm her story, I found out everything matched.
It was exactly what she said.
And then it wasn't until four years later, it wasn't until 2006, she was living in Jacksonville, Florida, and I went and visited her and I said, Eva, do you have any pictures of Nick?
So far, she'd never given me any pictures of Nick.
And she told me the story, and she says, I think I might have a couple.
He never wanted them taken, you know, during their wedding, no pictures.
She says he never wanted a picture taken.
But she says, I might have a couple.
And she looked for about 20 minutes through her apartment and found a couple pictures.
And that was the thing right there that said, this is true to me.
That exactly hit me right there.
And I said, Eva, can I have the pictures?
She said, yes, of course.
And she's given me everything.
I have all the documentation.
I have all medical records, all military records, all pictures, everything.
All right, so these pictures are in the book, presumably.
Yes, yes, those pictures are in the book.
And it wasn't that I saw Howard Hughes in these pictures, because I didn't until later on that I studied and studied and studied the facial characteristics of them.
The fact that she had pictures, that she gave them to me, she said, here he is.
You know, I always went a long ways away.
And that's what really confirmed me that, okay, this is real.
And then after I started comparing pictures, I said, they got the same facial characteristics, the same curvature of the head, that type of thing, all matched between Nick and Howard.
What about the money?
Because this guy, it goes without saying seriously wealthy.
Did they live a wealthy lifestyle?
No, they didn't.
They lived a very simple lifestyle.
He evidently wasn't really that enamored with all the money because he lived a very simple lifestyle with Eva.
They lived on basically, she had a civil service retirement and she had Social Security, and he had actually an Air Force disability check coming to him that the man's who identity that he took, a man named Werner Nicely, the identity that he took, earned it, but he was getting it.
And they lived a very, very simple life as they traveled from place to place to place and lived in different locations.
And then all of his wealth, of course, when the Stand-In died in 76, Howard Hughes' estate was worth about $2.2 billion.
And that all went into the courts and, of course, was fought over by the family and various entities for years and years and years.
It was massively disputed.
There was even a scam artist who wrote a book, wasn't there, claiming to be the memoirs of Howard Hughes, that Howard Hughes had to come out, and I wanted to ask you about this, and hold a telephone news conference, which I remember again being a little boy watching this thing on the TV, to say that man is a liar.
How does that compute and how does that tie in with all of this?
Because this man who says he was Howard Hughes must have been part of that.
Or did the stand-in do the news conference?
No.
Okay, let me see how we piece that together.
That was in January of 72.
And Nick and Eva were living in Panama.
And the stand-in was actually living in the Bahamas at that point in time, in a hotel in the Bahamas.
And Eva saw something in December of 71.
Eva talked to Nick and said, something's bothering you.
What's bothering you?
And he said, there's a book that's coming out about Howard Hughes that is a bunch of lies.
Eva says, if that is the case, shouldn't the public know about that?
And within about 10 days of that conversation, there was a phone teleconference scheduled between Howard Hughes and six or seven very respected journalists in Los Angeles.
And they talked for two hours, two and a half hours, and many of them recognized the voice and things like that.
He said, I don't have long fingernails.
I keep myself very physical shape and all of that.
And up to that point in time, there'd been all of this media on the 100-pound dog-haired long-fingernail strange guy.
And his description of himself is totally different.
In piecing this together, what we've got is that Nick and Howard made that phone call from Panama and called in.
They tried to trace the phone call after that.
They said they could never trace it, the phone call.
But he was in Panama.
Eva was listening to the conversation on the radio, and she saw Nick after that.
She recognized his voice.
She saw Nick after that and said, Nick, that voice was you.
And he just smiled.
He didn't acknowledge it, didn't deny it, nothing.
He just smiled at her.
But at that point in time, he said, I'm not, you know, I keep myself in very good physical shape.
I don't have terribly long hair.
I don't have long fingernails.
I'm very healthy.
And he described as being very much in charge of his business at that point in time.
Very, very different than the long-haired, long-fingernail guy.
Now, you say in charge of business, but how would he conduct business?
I know he had some people who were very loyal to him working for him and with him.
There was a guy for a while called Noah Dietrich, I think, who was with him for most or all of his working life.
He would still have to deal with these people, presumably, so how did he do that?
How he did it, he had about three aides with him and Eva.
And Eva would see the AIDS.
And he had about three aides with him, and there was about three or four aides with the stand-in.
Now, the interesting thing about it is the Hughes Corporation controlled the CIA's communications satellites.
So they could have a satellite dish where Nick and Eva were, they could have a satellite dish where the stand-in was, and they can communicate back and forth there without anything ever being able to be traced.
So he ran all of his business through his AIDS, and all communications and everything went through the AIDS to appear like it was coming from where the stand-in was.
However, he was actually making the decisions where he was located with his group of three AIDS.
All right, so other people were involved, which brings me round to this point.
It is a few years ago now, more than a few years ago.
People were involved in this thing.
People knew about this thing, knew how he was dealing, and yet nobody's wanted to tell the story before either to you.
Doesn't that strike you as odd?
You're exactly right.
What we think there was about nine people that knew what was going on.
Five or six were aides.
There were two doctors.
There's a Dr. Thane and a Dr. Crane.
And they knew what was going on, we believe.
And where are they?
Pardon me?
Where are they?
All of these people are dead.
You see, I'm going to get people emailing me saying this is all very convenient.
Of course, a lot of them will be dead because this is decades and decades and decades ago.
But there must be somebody still alive who might be able to verify, corroborate some of this.
Yeah, we're not finding anybody who was involved with this at that point in time that's still living.
When I started working on this book, there's a gentleman named Gary Magnusson, who's an ex-FBI gentleman, and he wrote a book regarding Melvin Dumar.
And he said there's one aide alive, and his name was George Frankham.
And he said, George isn't talking.
The aides were all paid to be quiet.
They were all on lifetime contracts not to say anything.
And so everyone who knew about it was either very, well, they're all very loyal to Howard, and they're being paid to keep their mouth shut is how that all happened.
And nobody, as far as we know, nobody's decided to write all of this down to be looked at at some point after their death.
As far as you know?
They wouldn't do it.
They had no benefit in ever doing anything like that.
Now, Howard, according to what you say, had assistance from the CIA to assume this new identity, which is a pretty big claim.
Were that to be so, wouldn't there be a paper trail surely somewhere?
Yeah, the CIA is going to have everything classified.
If we do link in the CIA on this thing, this is how it goes.
The man Werner Neisley, the identity that Howard Hughes took, worked for the CIA.
His son and his family confirmed that to me.
He disappeared in 1969.
We have no idea what happened to Werner Neisley.
His son left him in 1967.
I've talked to his son several times.
I have great respect for him.
His son left his dad in 1967, and his dad disappeared.
He was 5'11 and was born in 1921, typical life, went in the military, things like that.
But that's the identity now that he took.
He was looking for the CIA.
At this point in time in 68, 69, the CIA went to Howard Hughes and said, will you help us raise a submarine, a Soviet submarine that had gone down in the Pacific about 700 miles northwest of Hawaii?
Because we want to raise it and we want to see what it is.
He did that.
He was involved with that.
What we think he said was, fine, I'll go do that.
You help me with another identity while I go do this thing for you.
We'll just trade it.
And then another interesting thing was the communications, as we talked about, which he had control of, the CIS communications satellites.
And then the other interesting thing is when the stand-in died, 1976, the long-haired, long-fingernail, 100-pound gentleman, when he died in 1976, at that service, now this was a fake man there, at this service, there was 25 people there.
24 people were family members, most of whom Howard never met.
There were no aides there.
There were no doctors here.
There were no anybody's taking care of him for the last five, six, seven years.
None of those people were there.
There are 25 family members who he'd never met.
And there was one other gentleman who was in attendance who was a CIA agent.
Really?
And his job, obviously, was to get this guy in the ground.
And they got the body in the ground in less than 48 hours after he died.
I remember it all happened really quickly.
So this guy was just there to make sure that the last bit of this particular drama was played out in a military fashion, done easily, quickly, and above all else, quietly.
Exactly.
So from that point of view, it worked very well because we're only talking about this now.
So how many count the years?
36.
Yeah.
And remove all obstacles to getting the body in the ground, and that's what they did.
That's exactly what they did.
So this other guy is buried.
The other guy, the stand-in.
The stand-in is buried.
He wasn't cremated.
Not cremated.
No.
The stand-in is buried in a cemetery just west of Houston.
That's fantastic because I don't know how you would begin to do this legally, but you could actually, theoretically, with today's DNA techniques, you could prove this.
Correct.
Correct.
And we've been working on some DNA testing that has not led us anywhere at this point.
We've got some others going on.
But if someone, you know, I'm not going to push this thing.
If someone would like to dig those people up, you know, I'm not going to go push that thing.
But they could do DNA between them and they would find that the DNA does not match the parents that's in the two graves next to the gentleman who's in the Howard Hughes grave.
Are you not tempted to, you say that you've got copious notes, you've got photographs, you've got a lot of other evidence that you used for the basis of the book that you've written with Doug Wellman.
Are you not keen to perhaps go to some legal authority somewhere and say, there you go, there's my dossier.
This is what happened.
This is a mystery.
This needs to be public, public domain.
Why don't we dig up the body, do the DNA tests, and lay this one to rest?
Yeah, we have tried various ways to get this story out, and it's almost like it's too wild.
It's too wild of an affair, because most people look at two issues we run into is one is most people who we talk about this story with are like your friends.
Who the heck was Howard Hughes for one thing?
And then the other thing is it's kind of like, I'm not touching it.
I'm not touching this story.
And we've run into that a lot of people just afraid of it or not interested in even pursuing it because it's just so wild.
Eva's not with us anymore, is she?
She's not alive yet.
No, Eva died in November of 209.
So quite recently, and you have tapes.
Yes, I have tapes.
And I was there when she died.
In fact, Doug and I were putting a book together at that point in time, and I would ask her questions, and she'd answer questions.
Her mind was sharp, very, very sharp.
And she'd answer questions just like she'd done 567 years prior.
And we asked her questions two weeks before she died.
And she was still answering them like she did 5, 6, 7 years ago.
It's a really compelling story.
But the journalist in me says, I'm very interested by third party, but I need to get the actual subject.
And I would love to hear the tapes, I'm sure the world would, of Eva speaking, because even though we can't See her and talk to her now, you can hear in somebody's voice if there's credibility there.
Right, right.
What are you going to do with the tapes?
I've got tapes.
Eva would not talk to me about this in her apartment.
She felt it was bugged.
She was very paranoid.
He'd made her very paranoid.
And so she felt that it was bugged.
And so she would not talk to me.
So she and I would go out and drive, and I would record her.
They lived actually on what's called the ranch, what he called the ranch, west of Troy, Alabama, on 20 wooded acres.
And she wanted to go there.
And so I would pick her up in Dolphin, Alabama.
We'd drive up there, and I'd be recording her as we went there and trying to get this story down.
And so I've got tape after tape after tape of our conversations, these little cassette tapes, of our conversations going back and forth with her and trying to figure this out.
I would say, and what do I know about this?
But I would say you're sitting on dynamite there then.
If you publicize those, if you got those out to the world, then that's amazing stuff.
That could make you rich, but certainly get the story out there.
Yeah, all I'm concerned about is Eva wants a story out, and that's really what I'm concerned about.
She says it's a secret.
She said the long-haired, long-fingernail guy that was disgraceful, a disgraceful way to pass.
And she said, I just want this story out.
She says, I've never expected any money from this story.
But she wants the truth out regarding a magnificent man that she knew for 31 years.
Tell me about this.
Howard Hughes was a man, like a lot of famous, successful, and strange people around whom myths and legends emerge and upon whom people try to perpetrate the most amazing scandals and scams.
There was one that we know about that was the basis of that movie, Hoax.
Other people tried to get his money after he died, saying, I was connected, I was family.
I used to joke when I was at school that I had a connection.
Of course, apart from the name, sadly, I don't, as far as I know, of course.
How do I know that you're not just another hoax, sir?
Well, I'm a major general in the Air Force, and I've put this story together with Doug Wellman.
Doug Wellman is the Associate Dean of Cinematic Arts at USC, and so we've got pretty good credibility on this.
And what we wanted to do, Eva wanted to make sure that everything was accurate.
And so I went back and actually read the book two or three times, making sure that the story was accurate.
There's no Hollywood in it.
And to the best of our ability, we can put it together.
I did go back to Alabama in December, and we talked to quite a few people in Troy, Alabama, that knew them.
There's about nine people that came up to us and said we knew them, we interacted with them, and everything that you have in the books is exactly like what they ran into.
They knew there is mystery there, but they could never explain what it was.
So for those people, you've given them the last piece of the jigsaw.
Right.
When they read the book, they said, I understand it now.
And they said it's exactly what happened.
You've taken a great big leap here, and so has Doug Wellman, because you've both, as you say, I mean, you know, military man yourself, and he's got a senior academic position.
You're not just ordinary Joes, and you've put your credibility on the line for this.
Yeah, our credibility is on the line.
We knew this as it was coming out.
We definitely knew.
And if there's any question in my mind, although I don't have the DNA proof, I wish I did, but if there's any question in my mind that this was not absolutely 100% true, I'd have never been associated with putting a book out.
Okay, that's fine.
I know that people will email me with their own thoughts.
I think it's an amazing story.
And you know what?
The greatest thing that speaks to this for me is knowing what I know about Howard Hughes or having read what I've read about Howard Hughes, maybe he was so sick and tired.
You could see it in those congressional hearings that he was part of.
But maybe wasn't he before a grand jury, something like that.
They accused him of all sorts of paying backhanders, as we say here, bribes and all sorts of other things.
It strikes me that a man like that would say, I've had enough of living in the spotlight like this.
I don't want to be mocked anymore.
I don't want to be commented on.
I don't want to be photographed.
I don't want to be talked about.
I just want to disappear.
And to me, the biggest piece of evidence that there is is the thought that somebody in that situation would behave exactly like that.
Yes, and that's exactly what he did, I believe, was, I just don't want to put up with this anymore.
I want to escape.
And those later years of his life, if you read, there's about 30 books out on this gentleman, Howard Houston.
I've owned half of them, read every one of them.
I've got some of them too, Mark.
Let me tell you.
During those last four years of his life, three to four or five years of his life, there's no explanation.
You can't read it.
You can't even follow it.
All of the mystery that's there, and many of the books actually end up as this mysterious life.
We're not even sure what happened to it, what really happened.
But you cannot follow the books in the later years, and nothing ever explains it until Eva McClellan came forward and said, I've got the story, and I'm trying to get it out.
And from what you tell me of her, she sounds like a very resolute, very sane person.
Yes.
Everyone who met her just loved her.
She was a class lady, just a class lady, and she just had a memory that was just amazing.
Of course, she had a lot of stuff to remember, too.
But she could go back, she would go back in their conversations in 72, 73, 74 and recall their conversations to me.
And I'd ask her again, maybe six months or a year later, and she would use the exact same words.
Nothing ever changed.
In fact, many of these things she had written down.
She took a writing class in 93, and she'd written down many of these episodes of her life, and some of those things became some of the basis for what the chapters in the book were.
And was there no feeling on Eva's part that she was in some way betraying Howard?
I know this great compulsion that you tell me she felt to get the story out there before she was no longer on this earth, but did she not somewhere deep down feel that maybe she'd betrayed him?
Oh, that's a great question.
Because I asked Eva as we got near the book, I said, Eva, you know, this is coming out.
And she says, I know.
And I said, would Nick appreciate this to come out?
And she thought for 20, 30 seconds, and she said, he would.
She said, he fooled the world, and he would be pleased that this story is coming out.
Well, that's a comprehensive answer.
Howard Hughes had contacts with, very close contacts with, a lot of movers and shakers, a lot of congressmen, senators, people at every level.
Is there any evidence that Howard Hughes, when he took over this new identity, kept in touch with any of those people?
One of the, this is a great question, too.
One of the things, we have a display at a museum in Nebraska on the artifacts, and one of the things that we found in the artifacts was a little, like a lapel pin, and it says U.S. Congressional Advisory Board is what it says, U.S. Congressional Advisory Board.
And I look at this thing, I think, okay, Eva would have never been on the U.S. Congressional Advisory Board.
Vernon Eisley would have never been on the U.S. Congressional Advisory Board.
However, Howard Hughes would probably have been connected in some way.
As we trace that pin back, that pin goes back to the 80s, 1980s, which shocked us.
And as we did more research on the pin, it traces back to an ex-senator named Paul Lexalt from Nevada who was involved with this U.S. Congressional Advisory Board.
Paul Lexalt and Howard had numerous phone conversations.
They never met, I believe, but they had numerous phone conversations.
And we believe somehow Paul Lexalt got this pin to Howard to say thank you.
And therefore, he would have known that he's alive.
I got a book, Paul Lexalt, I believe, is 88 or 89.
I got a book to him, and I believe he read it, and he won't talk to me.
That is amazing.
Do you think he might be able to change his mind?
If I can't talk to him, I think it's hard to do.
It's a dialogue of the deaf, isn't it?
You can't.
Okay.
Well, it's still worth trying perhaps one more time.
That is truly staggering, and that is almost almost the smoking gun, isn't it?
If we could be able to trace that back, that's something that we just can't dog on.
I wish Eva was alive so I could say, Eva, where did this pin come from?
This lapel pen?
Because it's a very professionally done pen, U.S. Congressional Advisory Board.
And she would know.
She'd say, oh, that's where it came from.
And help us fill in that mystery associated with that pen, which is still sitting there, too.
You know, we've got kind of a jigsaw puzzle here that we put together.
But there's still some missing pieces.
The overall picture becomes Howard Hughes took another identity, lived as another man, did his business through his AIDS, and married Eva.
That's the picture, the general picture.
But there's details in there that's still missing that are now coming forward from time to time that confirm what we've put in the book.
And the man who was living as Howard Hughes and who died as Howard Hughes and wasn't Howard Hughes, his story remains very largely untold.
That would be fascinating to find out more about.
That would be very interesting to find out more about that gentleman because we know very, very little about him.
Of course, the ones who could provide that information would be the AIDS, and they're not with us anymore.
And also Dr. Thane and Dr. Crane, who helped provide him with medication to keep him under control.
And reputedly, Howard Hughes had a great saying that I've never forgotten.
Every man has his price, Howard Hughes is supposed to have said.
So if every man has his price, then you can pay just about anybody off, and you can keep your secrets.
He did well at that.
He tried to influence presidential dealings.
He tried to influence anybody that he could influence because he had the money to do it.
And so he was always working on his agenda on what he thought was the right approach on things.
I think there's quite a few differing opinions on whether they're the right approach or not.
But it's funny.
Eva met him in December, in November of 69, and she asked him, how long have you been in Panama?
And he said, about two months.
Now, Werner Neisley moved to Panama in 1957.
So Werner Nicely sort of said, I've been in Panama about 12 years.
Howard Hughes says, I've been in Panama about two months.
If we go back to what was happening in September of 69 in Las Vegas, what we get is huge racial unrest that was happening there.
And there was also a nuclear test that was going to happen.
Howard tried to influence to get that nuclear test stopped, was not able to do it.
Of course, he was very afraid of germs.
And so he had two reasons to leave Las Vegas in September of 69.
One being the racial unrest, of which he really didn't want to get involved with at all, and the other one being this nuclear test.
And so two huge reasons there to try him to get out of town in Las Vegas, go someplace else.
The nuclear test certainly computes because we know as a matter of record that he tried every trick in the book to try and get that thing stopped or moved.
Correct.
That is absolutely correct.
He was absolutely, from what we read and what we understand, terrified of the thing.
Yes, very much so.
And Nick, the identity that he took, you know, Nick was Howard, was always concerned about germs.
You know, Eva said, you know, he's always concerned about germs.
In fact, he wore gloves.
He wore gloves.
For three reasons, we believe.
One is for germs.
One is for Fingerprints, and the other one is because his hands were burned during the aircraft accident in 1946.
And we've had people confirm to us that, yes, his left hand was damaged.
Eva said his left hand was damaged, and other people told us that too.
I wanted to get to that because he did get quite injured in that thing, and he was lucky to have lived afterwards.
And some people say he was never quite the same guy after that.
Eva would have seen and lived with those injuries.
Eva said his hands were burned and his feet were burned.
And if you read the books, the books say his hands were burned and his feet were burned.
He would never tell her what happened.
He would never tell Eva what happened.
But we've had other people say, yes, his hands were damaged in some way.
She said they were very tender.
His hands were very tender.
And therefore the other reason to wear gloves.
But he wore gloves even up until the end.
He wore gloves years and years and years and years, because he could never, ever could afford to be found out.
Right, which fingerprinting, I guess, could do and various other ways, and the injuries would certainly have found him out.
Now, Howard Hughes loved aviation, and he loved automobiles, from what I understand.
It is amazing that during those years he was with Eva, he didn't want to exercise his passion for those things, or did he?
He actually did.
In 1973, he went and flew aircraft in England, either three.
Some books say three times, some books say four times.
And there's a gentleman named Tony Blackman who was chief pilot at Hawker Siddley, and he flew with him.
And he said, he described Howard as a charming man, a healthy man, a friendly man, a man that you would enjoy visiting with.
You know, that type of a man, a man you wouldn't call a friend.
However, three weeks after now we have a man, and I don't mean he flew in an aircraft, I mean he did touch-and-goes, he did landings in the aircraft.
And three weeks after this, we now have the Howard Hughes.
This is a stand-in now, in a hotel in London, Falls.
It was August 9th, 1973, Falls.
They bring the doctor and medical support in, and they said, this guy looks like a prisoner of war.
Long hair, long finger down, 90 pounds, bone sticking through his skin, broken hip now.
They declared him mentally incompetent.
Now, I just can't imagine.
We have a mentally incompetent man who's three weeks earlier flying an airplane.
It doesn't match.
It just doesn't match.
That is an amazing story.
And of course, there'll be people over here, presumably, who will remember that.
Did this guy, as far as you're aware, remember whether the Howard Hughes or the Nick who flew with him had a Texan draw?
I don't know on that.
Eva said he really didn't have a Texan accent.
Whether he lost it, whether he never had it, whether he lost it, I don't know.
But she said he never really, that she recognized, had much of an accent.
Have you had a chance to assess how the book is playing in Texas?
Because, you know, the name's still a big one there.
I don't know.
The book hasn't taken off yet.
We've had some good sales, but the book hasn't taken off yet, I think, primarily because of the wildness of the story.
And I also think, you know, because a lot of people don't know about it.
I think it's an amazing story, needs to be more widely heard.
We love it.
We'd love to do that.
Well, look, one of you is experienced in cinematography.
This is a movie, isn't it?
There has been many comments about that.
Again, it hasn't been put together.
You know, the matches haven't been put together to go down that path.
But this would be a great movie because no movies have really been done about his last seven, eight years of life because nobody could explain it.
Now it can be explained in this.
It's not much of a movie to have a long-haired, long-finged guy laying in a bed.
Well, Leo DiCaprio managed it, didn't he?
To an extent.
And he did a great job of it, too.
With Kate Blanche.
When that movie came out, I think it was 03, 04, Eva wanted to go see it.
And so she was living in Jacksonville, and so she and I went and saw the movie, and she loved it.
She said it's exactly him.
It's exactly him.
Every nuance, every idiosyncrasy was him.
And so she just really enjoyed that movie.
And so she and I went to it.
I did too.
I loved having posters all over London with my name on them.
How cool is that?
And also, I loved it when I went to Los Angeles and they've got a Howard Hughes Freeway, haven't they, there?
Or Parkway, Howard Hughes Parkway.
I was on that.
And that was just amazing.
I don't think we have to forget in the middle of all of this.
And I think the sad thing about Howard Hughes and the story that that movie depicted and other dramas that have appeared about him and some of the books, you know, they kind of portray him as a bit of a nut.
And to portray Howard Hughes as a nut is not really to get the guy, is it?
Howard Hughes was a genius.
He was an absolute genius.
And he knew exactly what he was doing in all business and all aspects of his life.
He certainly had some idiosyncrasies like the germ thing.
He, you know, inherited or given to him, I think, by his mother's concern for germs.
But there are some things that he was very paranoid over.
But the guy was just amazing.
And Eva said, you know, he was the smartest person I've ever known.
And several people in Alabama last December made the comment that those two were these absolute smartest people that I've ever known in my life.
And they were so impressed with him.
They knew there was something going on there.
They just didn't know what.
I wonder what it was like to live with him.
I wonder if he was like forever doing DIY and stuff like that, because this guy loved to invent things.
She said he could repair anything.
Really?
He did a lot of repairs around the house.
He enjoyed working with tools.
He'd buy tools, and he could repair anything.
Now, on the other hand, he was probably bipolar because he would be very gentlemanly, very courteous, Very charming, and then instantly change over to this verbally mean man.
And there'd be times when Eva just couldn't put up with it more and she had to leave.
And so she would leave for months at a time.
And that would be then when Howard Hughes shows up, like when he flew in England, that's when Eva left him.
Eva left, and he flew in England for three times there, three or four times there.
And so those things that would happen that's recorded in the books as the normal Howard Hughes happen when they were separated.
She had to live with that, if he was bipolar, and also something that was the biggest fiction of all time, one of them.
She did.
And as she put this whole thing together, let's just face it, she loved the guy.
She just loved him.
And she said, in the end, she said, I do it again.
You know, I loved him so much.
I do it again.
And at the end, he would just hold her.
He died of cancer in 2001.
He'd just hold her and hug her and say, I love you so much.
I love you so much.
And they loved each other.
And so they always got back together again, no matter how long these separations were, because some of them went for nine months.
they always got back together again and ended their lives together.
I wonder why, Howard, at the very end, this story, He resisted the temptation to come out at the very, very end and say, well, actually, this is me, and I've fooled a lot of you.
That's interesting, because, you know, that would surely have been nice to have if that was the case.
But I think what he got, she said he started, they started seeing signs of cancer on his left ear, visual signs of cancer on his left ear in 93.
And she said, go to the doctor, go to the doctor, go to the doctor.
He says, I will when I'm ready.
I will when I'm ready.
And she said, as that went on, she said he was just ready to die.
And the cancer got advanced, more advanced, more advanced, more advanced.
And she said towards the end, he'd accepted it.
He was ready to die.
He was ready to go.
And he virtually welcomed it.
And so I think towards that end, and then the other thing about it was in 71, 72, 73, there were 40 lawsuits against this guy.
40 lawsuits.
And now they have the standing declared mentally incompetent.
So that's going to help a little bit on these lawsuits.
You know, what are they going to do?
They're going to go sue this mentally incompetent guy.
And so if he comes back, you know, there's going to be all these lawsuits come back up against him.
Writes the one good reason not ever to show your face again.
Another good reason to just say, okay, I'm just going to go.
Shame though, he didn't even leave an affidavit.
Oh, boy.
Wouldn't it be marvelous?
Because I've got a lot of her writings on it.
I've got the medical records.
I've even got the medical records from the VA that he went to in Montgomery, Alabama.
This is in 99, 2001, 99, 2000, 2001.
And I've been through those.
I had Eda get those for me because I wanted to see what those say.
And even then, he'd been 95 years old.
He was still six foot tall, 72 inches tall.
So he lost four inches, but he was still taller than Verner nicely ever was.
He was only 5'11 to start out with.
And it says, where were you born?
I was raised in Texas.
It says, my parents died young.
I was an orphan.
That's what were your hobbies when you're younger.
I used to fly airplanes.
All of the things, even in those little elements of those records, support Howard Hughes.
They don't support Vernon Island.
Mark Musick, and I love your name, by the way.
I'd love one day for you to tell me the story of that name.
But you now have the task of being true to your project and trying to get that story out there.
And that could be a lifetime's work for you.
Are you ready?
Yes.
Yeah, I've pretty much committed myself to this in how to get this thing out.
Because I have no doubt it's true.
Like I said, we don't have the DNA proof, but I have no doubt it's a true story.
And so it's a matter now of we're trying to just get it wherever we can.
We've done a lot of radio interviews, and it's beginning to gain some visibility that we have had a hard time gaining because the story is about a man who lived 50 years ago, and it's wild.
It's one of those stories of, oh, just get away from me.
But Doug and I are up to it.
We're in this thing together, and we do a lot of radio interviews together.
I'm sorry he can't be on this one, but if you'd like to do another one, I'd love to do another one and go into more detail of this whole strange, strange story.
I'd love to.
Doug Wellman, your co-author, you're the researcher on this, but you had to do the legwork, which is not the easiest part of it.
I think in many ways, you know, the hardest part of this thing was the bit that you did.
Well, what I did, as I began to hear a story, and I began to, okay, there's something to this, or there might be something to this.
I don't know whether they believe it or not.
And she said, like, they lived in Prescott, Arizona.
They lived in Camp Verde, Arizona.
They lived in Flagstaff, Arizona.
So I went back to those places, or made contact back to those places, and tried to confirm, is what she's telling me, is that the situation in those, where they lived.
And as I went back, I found out it's exactly correct.
Everything she's telling me is exactly correct.
I went back and looked up the birth certificate for Werner Nicely, 1921.
And so everything was exactly as what she had said.
And so I began to be able to confirm what she was telling me and then come to that conclusion of, even though I don't have the proof, every bit of evidence that she's providing me, and she says, you can have it all.
She says, it's all yours.
You can have everything associated with it.
And so I've got that.
We now have some of that on display.
But that's kind of what led us into this thing.
And now we're at the point of we're going down a path and we're telling the story of what we believe our best knowledge of what that story is, which is different than what history calls out.
I think it's an amazing story.
And what you need right now is what the journalists call traction.
You need to get a little bit of traction on this.
And once that thing starts for you, once this is picked up, people are going to hear this interview and the other media coverage that you're getting.
And it does work like a snowball falling down a mountainside.
You'll be surprised once it happens, but you've got to reach that kind of, what do they call it in aviation, V1, is it?
The vector point, the point where planes take off.
You have to get that critical speed and then you're going to fly.
I think it's a great story.
I know I'm going to get a lot of people who say, this is nonsense and that guy's talking garbage.
In just half a minute, what would you say to them, to those people who are going to email me?
They'll be the ones who say, what a fantastic story, which I think it is, and those who say, rubbish, not listening to it.
I would say what you've got to do, it took me four years to believe it.
What you've got to do is get that book called Boxes, The Secret Life of Howard Hughes.
It's on Amazon.
It's on BarnesandNoble.com.
Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com.
And you almost have to sit down and read the book to accept it.
Because it's just, you have to change everything you thought you knew about Howard Hughes and just kind of move it outside and read this thing to be able to accept the story.
Because, like I said, it took me years to do it.
So when someone hears a 45-minute conversation, it's going to be pretty hard to accept that.
Boxes, The Secret Life of Howard Hughes.
Why boxes?
Eva wanted it called House of Boxes because he would never let her unpack.
Everywhere they went, they lived from boxes.
And he always had to be able to leave.
In fact, at the ranch, the 20 acres of wooded property west of Troy, Alabama, he kept his clothes in barrels.
And even I went back to the ranch, and she showed me, okay, his clothes are in those barrels, and I went and looked in them.
And there's about five barrels there, and sure enough, there was clothes in the bottom, shirts, slacks, neatly folded, all laundered.
And she said he had to be able to leave.
So he kept his clothes in barrels so that they could just throw him in the back of a pickup truck.
He'd hop in the front and he'd be gone.
He'd just disappear.
What an amazing story.
Mark Musick, thank you very much for sharing that with me.
The book is called Boxes, The Secret Life of Howard Hughes, written by Douglas Wellman, researched by the man we've just been talking to, Mark Musick.
What a fantastic story.
Mark Musick, thank you very much.
Howard, this has been wonderful.
Thank you so much.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
Thank you very, very much for listening to this show.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell in Liverpool at Creative Hotspot for designing the website and getting the show out to you.
And if you want to get in touch with me, go to our website, triple w.theunexplained.tv.
There, you can also make a donation to the show.
Thank you very much for being part of this.
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