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Aug. 4, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:39
Edition 263 - Howard Hughes Update

New evidence the eccentric multi-millionaire may have lived for years after we were toldhe'd died...

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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.
Summertime and the living is, well, it's okay.
We've had some cooler weather, thankfully, over the last week or so.
And now the forecasters who have a habit of being wrong sometimes, but they may be right this time in telling us that we're in for a heat wave, at the end of the week that I'm recording this in.
We will see.
But there's a lot to play for, a lot of summer still to go before the sun moves to the southern hemisphere.
Thank you very much for all your emails.
I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
All of your responses to the show, please keep those coming.
And remember, when you do email me, tell me who you are, where you are, and most importantly, how you use this show.
Massively important that you tell me that.
And then I can get an idea of who's there and maybe as importantly as that, the kind of things that you like to hear.
The guest on this edition is somebody we've had on this show before.
The man's name is Mark Musick.
And we're going to talk about my namesake, Howard Hughes, the famous American eccentric multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire and his bizarre life, which may, according to Mark and others, it has to be said, be more bizarre than ever we knew.
It's been claimed by a number of people, Mark is one of them, that Howard Hughes did not die, as it was claimed on a jet being flown for medical treatment, away from his reclusive life in his own hotel, which you will have heard most recently about, I guess, in the Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Aviator.
It's claimed that he had another life, that he opted out of the life that he was leading.
And we'll see.
Mark has an update, a new book out, a new version of his book, and we'll talk about the new evidence that he says he's got about the mysterious and the amazing Howard Hughes in this edition of the show.
Remember that Howard Hughes not only was eccentric, but he was also, in his time, a gifted aviator, the inventor of the Spruce Goose, but also famous for a lot of aviation breakthroughs and technology.
A very famous oil man, of course, that's what his family in Texas were into.
Man who made movies.
He was accomplished at golf.
So he wasn't only as we remember him in those last bizarre years in the hotel in Las Vegas.
All right, before we get to Mark Musick and Howard Hughes, let's do your shout-outs now.
David in Liverpool, nice to know that you've recently rediscovered the show, David.
Nice to know that you're there.
Kim wants me to talk about the Mandela effect.
An update on that, Kim.
I keep emailing the people behind the research and getting no reply, but I will keep trying.
Tom in Green Bay, Wisconsin sends me a picture of Tom, your pooch, your porch, and the MP3 player that you listen to my shows on.
It's a fantastic scene.
Sounds like a lovely place you live in.
Certainly looks like it.
And thank you for the picture.
Lee, I hope everything works out with your tinnitus, Lee.
Remember, the doctors have to do all of the tests they did with me.
So I had the MRI scan at everything.
And you will be okay, I'm sure.
But take the advice of the medics and make sure you do what they recommend.
Nick, Liverpodlian in the US.
Thank you for your thanks and all the guest suggestions that you made, the suggestions for the show.
Annie Nikolaevich tells me about a new film about Howard Hughes.
Annie, the subject of this show, as I said.
Ollie says, can you do something on Big Cats in the UK?
Yes.
And something on Rods.
I had Jose Escamilia on the old radio show, so I guess I can get him back.
Big Cats is interesting because I drive a few days a week to Berkshire.
And when I get to a place called Cavisham in Reading, I have to drive up a road that is on a pretty steep slope called Lowfield Road.
And there is the biggest cat that jumps out, leaps out from a hedge as I drive up that road.
It doesn't look like any cat I've seen.
And I've often wondered, is it some kind of lynx?
But maybe it is just a very big and well-fed domestic cat.
Lewis in Bournemouth, UK says, I want to start by saying how much I love the show and how entertaining it is.
I can't help but feel that you sound a bit disillusioned with some of the crazy guests that you've had on recently.
Please don't give up.
I won't say disillusioned.
Sometimes I wonder in a conversation, and it's not that often, you think, where is this going?
And how do you know this?
But hopefully I ask the questions that have to be asked, and, you know, everybody is entitled to a view, including the person who's doing the talking on the show, I guess.
But no, thank you, Lewis.
I won't be giving up.
Robert says, love the show.
Been working through the archives for four years on my drive to work.
I used to live in Stourport in 7, Worcestershire.
I used to be on Radio Wyvern.
Robert, I know all about Stourport in Worcestershire.
I left England for Canada 11 years ago, and Robert tells me a UFO experience that happened in the place that he lives, Niagara on the lake, near Niagara Falls.
He saw a plane, and then this is what he says.
He says, I noticed to my left what I thought to be a satellite moving away from me in a straight line, as satellites do.
Then the white spot suddenly moved extremely fast in an arc in the direction of the ground, at which point a meteor flashed across the sky from right to left, passing through the location where the spot of light was before disappearing, at which point I lost sight of the white spot.
This kind of thing of lights, things that move at great speed and do things that ordinary craft apparently can't do, very common in ufology.
Mike in Texas, nice to hear from you.
He says, it's pretty frustrating that you haven't had anybody on who's a current whistleblower.
Well, we're working on it.
One of the people I hope to get on here is Ollie Damogaard again, the man from Light on Conspiracies.
I know that's not strictly what you're talking about here.
And people like Dr. Michael Sala.
Yep, I'm going to be doing that.
I need to get more hours in the day, I think, and more days in the week.
David in Stockton on T's UK says, love the program and managed to get my partner hooked.
The more, the merrier.
And your podcast is helping me through my current situation.
David, I'm glad to hear that.
And Simon, who also suggests the Mandela effect, says, Howard, your interview style is impeccable.
I don't know about that, Simon, but very, very nice.
And I'm glad that you like the show.
All right, let's get to Mark Music in the United States.
A second visit to the unexplained for him.
I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, the mysterious Howard Hughes, the man whose name I've borne for all of these years, but about whom there is so much controversy and speculation.
Mark, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
Well, thank you for the opportunity to do this.
Now, look, you've done a lot of research.
We last spoke, I think, maybe four or five years ago, but from what you've told me in the emails that we've exchanged, there is a lot more to say.
I don't want you to go into it now, but there is a lot more information here.
When the first book came out in 2010, we had put eight years of research into that book.
And when that book first came out, we began getting additional information that we did not have when the first book was released.
And it just kept coming and coming and coming.
And so we spent another four years collecting this.
And then we spent another two years putting the second book out.
Now, look, I can understand my fascination with Howard Hughes because that's my name, and it really is.
Whenever I go to America, the guys at the airport, you know, the customs guys and the guys at the immigration department, they look at my passport, they call their friends over, they think it's funny.
But I've lived with this name proudly all of my life, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
But, you know, you're not called Howard Hughes, so what's your fascination with him?
Well, it was a story.
I met a lady named Eva McClelland, and this was in 2002, and very nice lady, very smart lady.
And she said she was married to Howard Hughes.
And I knew her husband had just died about two months before I met her.
And I said, Eva, how can that be?
Howard Hughes died 25 years ago.
And she said, that's what they want you to think.
And she started telling me this story.
I didn't believe her for four years.
I thought it was lunacy.
I thought it was just craziness.
But then after four years of going back and researching what she told me, going back to where they lived, looking at medical records, looking at the military records, I concluded she was absolutely right.
Howard Hughes did not die in 1976.
He was living under identity provided by the CIA of a man who worked for the CIA and just hid away, married to Eva McClelland for another 25 years.
Now, the first time you appeared on this show, I greatly enjoyed it, and a lot of my listeners did too.
But I also got emails from listeners saying this is a most unlikely story, and especially if you bear in mind the fact that Howard Hughes was a mysterious man, a man of mystery, literally.
There were many, many theories and rumors about him.
There was a man who claimed to have written his autobiography.
If you've seen the film with Richard Gere, the hoax, you'll know what I'm talking about.
A lot of trickery and fakery surrounded the life and the death of Howard Hughes.
So to have another story appear on the horizon was enough to test a lot of people's credulity, and they simply didn't buy it last time.
Oh, I think that's right.
It's a very, very strange story because you have to take what you thought of history and throw it away because it just is not true.
He had some periods of time there.
One of the things that we went through with the first book is go back and research what was really going on in the 70s.
In 72, 73 particularly, there was some strange, strange time in there.
In 72, beginning of 72, he was on a telephonic interview with seven journalists, and they said, well, it's his voice.
He talks just like he should talk.
He says he's not long-haired.
He's not long-finger-nailed, and so forth.
And then shortly after that, Howard Hughes is moved from the Bahamas into Nicaragua.
And the captain of the boat describes him as this 90-pound, long-haired, long-finger-nailed, you know, guy who couldn't converse.
Six weeks after that, he meets with the president of Nicaragua.
He describes him as a commanding man, a man in charge of his business, a healthy man.
And so it goes back and forth between this long-haired, long-finger-nailed drug addict to a commanding, charming man in charge of his business.
And it happens for about a two-year period.
And nothing ever, ever explains how can you be both until Eva McClellan's story comes forward and says the reason why it's both is because there's two men.
All right.
Well, let's park that for just a second because for those who don't know, and you know, sometimes there are people over here who don't know who Howard Hughes was and what he achieved and what he accomplished.
Talk to me about the man because we both share the view that he was indeed a remarkable man.
His achievements were many.
He was a golfer, wasn't he, and an aviator and a maker of movies.
He was many, many things.
He wasn't just the son of a rich man.
Oh, Howard, you are exactly right.
He was born in 1905.
He was an only child.
His parents died young, and he really had no more than an eighth-grade education.
That was about all that he had, which really wasn't that unusual in that time.
His parents died young, and he inherited a massive wealth from his father.
With that wealth, he made movies, he got involved with aviation, built airplanes, designed airplanes, owned many, many hotels in Las Vegas, and so forth.
He just kind of parlayed that wealth into a lot of different business areas.
However, he still had this very reclusive nature of him that he wanted to hide.
He really didn't want the public visibility of what he was doing.
And so his last picture was taken about 1954, and there's only one picture after that taken of him.
And so he went into this secretive mode.
Eva, married to him for 25 years, said he loved confusion.
He throw confusion in everything that he did.
And as you can see in his life there, he did The same thing.
He just would throw confusion into portions of his business and things so that you couldn't really understand what was really going on.
I think we have to try to understand what it was like to be in the spotlight to that degree.
These days, I don't even think the likes of Justin Bieber or Rihanna or the music stars of today or the movie stars, Leo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, various people, I don't even think they are under the kind of spotlight that back in the day Howard Hughes was.
So when he created this enormous aircraft, this seaplane, the Spruce Goose, nothing that big with so many engines, with such a big wingspan had ever been built.
And there it was.
And he promised that it would fly.
And he said that he would leave the country.
He would disappear if it didn't fly.
The whole world's media was watching him then.
Exactly.
That was the end.
He called it the Hercules because he really didn't like the name Spruce Goose.
But he flew that back in 1947 after his Senate hearings when they told him that it wouldn't fly.
And Eva actually asked him about that.
She said, why did you do that?
Why did you fly that?
That was such a dangerous thing.
And his response to her was, I was told it wouldn't fly, and I was going to prove that that plane would fly.
And he did.
I mean, it did get a few feet off the ground, a couple of yards, whatever, six feet off the ground or so off the water.
But it wouldn't do any more than that, and it was never going to.
It got up to about 60, 70 feet in altitude.
It is.
And it went for about a minute.
And people have told me since then, they said that one person who knew Howard in the 40s said that when he tried to turn left, it went right.
And when he tried to turn right, it went left.
And therefore, there was some adverse yaw associated with it.
And then another person told me, he said, that's all the power that the engine would provide.
It was right there, that 70-foot altitude.
He said the engines really wouldn't provide any more power than that.
So there evidently were some reasons why it never flew again.
And Mark, was that debarcler, that defeat for him, did that unbalance him, do you think, in any way?
Or had the seeds of strangeness already been sown?
If indeed there was strangeness?
Oh, there was definitely strangeness.
He had phobias, he was very much a germaphobe.
He had some personality quirks.
When Eva met him in 1969, first met him in 1969, she noticed that his personality could change instantly.
He could go from a very friendly, charming man to a very verbally vicious man just instantly.
And so he definitely had some personality quirks that he was living with.
Of course, those things are not always the sign of psychosis.
Sometimes professional, successful people can be like that.
I've worked for a few, let me tell you.
That's interesting because there's a lady that came to us.
This was after the first book came out.
There's a lady that came to us that provided us a lot of information.
She's in the last chapter of the second book.
And she interacted with them from 81 to 84 in Troy, Alabama.
And she said with that personality, she said he could choose how he wanted to respond.
If he wanted to respond in a gentlemanly manner, he could choose that.
Or if he wanted to respond in a very abrupt manner, he could choose that also.
Eva, the person you say that he married and was with him for all of those years, how did he meet her?
Because he was a man who was used to dating movie stars.
He could, you know, on the film lot, on the cinema lot where he was making pictures, he literally could have his pick of the women, and he did.
And he did, yes.
He had many, many women.
Eva somewhat resembled Elizabeth Taylor.
And she went to Panama in 1967, had divorced, went to Panama in 1967 to kind of get a new life.
And she worked actually with classified documents there.
So she was a very smart woman, very trusted woman, and she wrote well.
Who did she work?
Did she work for the CIA?
Who did she work for?
She had a civil service job at the Air Force Base there in Howard Air Force Base, actually in Panama.
Right.
So there would have been a commonality between the two of them with the aviation factor and the fact that Howard Hughes worked as a defense contractor himself and had many contacts in that field.
Absolutely correct.
Absolutely correct.
And they visited, first visited in late 69, and then he disappeared for two months.
And then he came back in February of 70.
They were engaged and married then in May of 70.
She did not know who he was.
She knew there was strangeness.
While they were gone, she told, she said, Nick, while you were gone there in December 69, January 70, I felt like I was being followed.
And he said, you were being followed.
We've checked out everything about you.
We're told that a cathartic moment it must have been in the life of Howard Hughes were those congressional hearings that he had to attend, where he was scrutinized for his business practices and the fact that some of those business practices were claimed to be corrupt.
And if the movie account is correct, and if what I've seen on YouTube from the old black and white newsreels is correct, he fought back.
And he said, well, look, everybody has to do business this way.
You have to pay backhanders, and that's the way that it goes.
People expect sweeteners for these deals, and that's how it is.
He had enemies.
There were people who were trying to bring him specifically down, weren't they?
Yes, yes, of course.
The richest man in America, possibly the richest man in the world, would have people that don't like him and want to bring him down.
That's very true.
That movie, The Aviator, was interesting because Eva wanted to go see that.
And so I took her to that movie.
This was 2004, I think it was.
I took her to that movie and I said, Eva, what do you think?
And she said, it's exactly him.
You know, Leonardo DiCaprio got it exactly right.
It's exactly the man she was living with.
So subsequent to that, you're saying, is where history begins to diverge.
There's the history of the Howard Hughes who became the recluse and lived quietly and privately and bizarrely in a hotel that he owned in Vegas.
And there is this other Howard Hughes who continued his business dealings but privately and somehow got hold of another identity with the help of the CIA.
Talk to me about that.
Okay, as we researched this other identity, he was using a name of Nick Nicole when he met Eva.
My name is Nick Nicoly.
However, the identification that he had was a man named Werner Nicely.
So it just added more confusion in there at all.
As we investigated Werner Nicely, I talked to his brother, I talked to his son, I found out that his brother last saw him in 1960, and he was going into, back to Panama to work on some secret mission type stuff, which might have been the Bay of Pigs planning.
And so he was involved with clandestine operations then.
I met his son.
His son told me that his dad, when he left him, which was 1967, when he left Panama, that his dad was working for the CIA and he was doing counter-drug in and out of Colombia.
And so his dad was definitely a CIA operative that was involved with several things over the years that the CIA would have been involved with.
And evidently, he just disappeared.
We don't know what happened to him unless he got some other identity, lived under some other identity.
After Eva figured out what was going on here, she asked him, she asked Nick, the name was going to, she asked Nick, she said, whatever happened to the real murder nicely?
Did he die in a war?
And Nick's response was, yes, it was something like that.
Right.
So what was the relationship between Eva and the man we believe was Howard?
It was a loving relationship, but a strained relationship.
There'd be times that she would have to leave.
She would have to just disappear because she got tired of dealing with his personality quirks.
And as we trace those back, those are the same times that he would do something.
He would fly airplanes.
He'd have meetings at those times that they were separated.
And one of the things that really happened was she left him in June 1st, 72.
She left him June 1st, 72, and she went and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona.
He stayed in Panama.
Well, she was intending to leave him for good because she just couldn't put up with him anymore.
But in mid-July, he showed up in Arizona.
And I said, and she asked him, what he'd been doing?
He said, well, I had some business and so forth.
I said, Eva, do you know what happened June of 72?
She said, no, I really don't.
I said, it was Watergate.
And Hunt and Liddy, who were arrested for Watergate, worked for a man named Robert Bennett who worked for Howard Hughes.
The office they went into, a man named Larry O'Brien, was also on the Howard Hughes payroll.
And I don't know if you remember or not, there was an 18-minute lapse in the Richard Nixon tapes.
According to H.R. Halterman, who was the chief of staff of Richard Nixon at that point in time, he said that is a Howard Hughes connection to Watergate.
And that's why that 18 minutes had to disappear.
It could never go anywhere, is because they were hiding the fact that Howard Hughes was involved with Watergate.
And Eva, I'm curious about Eva.
What did she suspect about the man that she was with?
What did she think?
1969, they got together.
Into the 70s, they went.
His lifestyle, bizarre, we have to say so.
I mean, anybody who lived like that, you'd be asking them, what do you do for a living?
You know, what's going on here?
So what did she believe about him?
Oh, that's an excellent question.
When they first met, okay, he was 6'4, a tall, handsome man.
When they first met, she knew there was strangeness there, but didn't really know what was going on.
They got engaged, got married.
Then she began to get more clues about what it was, about things that he would talk about, conversations she would overhear.
He was always dealing with AIDS.
He'd go out in the middle of the night, do phone calls, do communications in the middle of the night.
She asked him, can I meet your friends?
His response was, no, no, that's much too dangerous.
And she began to put these pieces together because she really didn't know who he was.
And then it took her about, she said, in about 73, she'd figured it out.
She knew that he was Howard Hughes.
And then it was in 74 and 75 that he revealed it to her.
He said, I'm Howard Hughes.
And she said, I already knew that.
And he revealed it to her.
After that, she could ask him any question.
He would always answer it.
They had AIDS always around them, always near them, up until 1976 when the stand-in died.
When the stand-in died, the long-haired, long-fingered, drug-addicted gentleman, when he died in 1976, the AIDS disappeared.
They weren't needed anymore.
And they were just on their own, and they just hid out basically for another 25 years.
Here's something I don't think I asked you the first time, Round.
If the person in the hotel in Vegas was a stand-in, why was it necessary to have this whole thing of the reports of Howard Hughes dying on a private plane being flown to get medical attention or whatever that story was so you can tell me the details?
You know, if it was a stand-in and it was straightforward, then couldn't he have just quietly died in a hotel in Las Vegas?
And, you know, America has ways of smoothing the way through the autopsy process, et cetera, doesn't it?
Well, that's interesting.
That's a very interesting episode there of this long-haired, long-fingernail guy dying.
We've gotten several reports of who that was.
We've concluded that it was a friend of, it was an acquaintance of Howard.
Howard knew who he was.
Howard was using him to cause confusion.
If you look, they really took him out of the country, out of the United States, in 1970 is when that man left out of the United States, or was it 71, or 71?
He left out of the United States, and then he moved from different islands to Panama, to Bahamas, to Nicaragua, to Canada, to Nicaragua, to England, back and so forth.
And one of the things there was Howard really didn't want to pay taxes.
And so if Howard Hughes is out of the United States, he really wouldn't be, you know, that'd be a way to reduce his tax burdens.
But they took him around like that just, again, to cause confusion on what was really going on.
Now, if you look at the hotels he was at, there's all kinds of massive antennas on those hotels.
What we found out is that Nick, living with Eva, had his own satellite phone.
And I don't mean cell phone.
I mean a satellite phone.
He controlled the CI's communications satellites.
Therefore, he could communicate on his satellite phone through the CI's communications satellites and never ever be tapped.
And weren't, correct me if I'm wrong, weren't the Hughes company, the Hughes conglomerate, wasn't that always involved in satellite technology anyway?
Yes.
Yes.
And he was involved with that.
He liked it because he could communicate.
It was on the leading edge of technology.
Howard always liked being on the leading edge of technology.
How could you be Nick and be Howard Hughes and be living with somebody who eventually got to know your identity?
How on earth could you keep that secret?
Well, that's interesting because what we have found since the book came out, we have found four different identities that he had used.
And these were real people.
These weren't just made-up identities.
They were real people.
He used at least four of them and maybe more than that.
He had body doubles.
He had people who looked like him.
And he'd send it to meetings.
And therefore, they'd have a meeting and say, well, look at in the back of the room.
There's Howard Hughes.
He'd be a gentleman that looked just like Howard, but it wasn't him.
And so he had this charade going on for years of hiding from the public, but yet creating confusion as to what was really happening with him.
Now, you need a lot of money to be able to do something like that.
You also need friends in high places.
So to what extent was he being aided and abetted, as you said, by the CIA?
Quite heavily.
We believe that he was actually involved with the CIA back in the beginnings of it, which might have been another reason why he became so reclusive with the things that he was involved with the CIA way back in the early 50s and so forth.
We also know that when he took this identity, this other identity, the man of Werner, nicely, it was also the timing was also associated right with the CIA going to Howard to ask him to raise a submarine.
The Soviets had a submarine that sank northwest of Hawaii in 1968.
And in 1969, they asked Howard to go raise it.
And he said, I will do that.
And he did it in 1974.
He did it.
But what we think he said was, I'll go raise that.
You get me another identity.
Because the identity came from the CIA of a CIA man right about the same time that the CIA approached him to go out and do a mission that they wanted done.
Now, that's interesting.
I don't think, and I should have got around to it before now.
I sort of tiptoed all around this point.
But why would he want to be somebody else?
He had enemies.
He might want to get away from them.
He had mental issues.
That's for sure.
He might want to have a quieter life.
But, you know, can we put our finger on exactly why he wanted to become someone else?
Well, I don't know as I know the exact answer on that, except that just the personality that he was.
And I think some of these things that he was dealing with with the CIA, he needed a cover.
He needed just to disappear.
Okay, so it was a necessary.
And if he got the byproduct of a quiet life from it, then from his point of view, that might have been a good thing.
Right, right, because they lived, Nick and Eva lived in Alabama for 25 years.
For about five years, they moved around quite a bit, and then they just settled in on a wooded property west of Troy, Alabama.
I was back there about two months ago and doing presentations, and the people there made the comment, well, if you want to hide, this is definitely the place to do it.
And on that, I asked Eva, you know, did people make contact with him?
She said, yes, they did, that he would send out postcards.
And then I asked Eva, do you know where the postcards went?
Do you know what they said?
No, no, I don't know.
Well, a lady, again, this lady who knew them in 81 to 84, she gave us information that she delivered the postcards.
So she know exactly where they went.
And people would come visit him.
After a postcard went out, people would come visit him.
Eva said that some of them came in helicopters.
But that's the way he would communicate to continue that going.
So there was a group of people, a small group of people, who still knew that he was alive.
Now, you've updated the book.
There's been enough information, you say, to have a whole new edition here.
So apart from you told me there were four other people who'd been involved in alternate identities for Howard that you discovered since the original Book.
What else is new?
Well, it's interesting because when the first book came out, we begin to have people come to us say, I'm the child of Howard Hughes.
And of course, history says Howard never had any children.
That's not true.
We've got several.
We have two chapters in the book, each dedicated to one of the two children of Howard's that we definitely believe are Howard's.
One was a daughter born in 1957, and she remembers him coming around when she was young.
And then he also made contact with her, again, under another identity in the 90s.
And so he had contact with her.
We went through and did her history.
We have her mother went through and did her history.
It all makes sense.
Well, there is one very good way of proving that in this day and age.
I guess there would be some way.
You could probably get something that Howard Hughes had owned and get her.
And couldn't you do a DNA test?
Well, we've been down that path on Howard's DNA.
We have not been able to get Howard's DNA.
That's a secret somewhere held by somebody.
But we did get Cindy's DNA.
And we had another gentleman come to us, he was born in 1942, the son of Howard Hughes.
If you put a picture up between him and Howard, it's exactly the same.
He was told your dad's Howard Hughes and so forth.
So we have his chapter.
We did DNA between those two, those two brother and sister with a common parent.
And if you do that, you have about a 50% match of your DNA, and they do indeed have a 50% match between their DNA.
If you look at the pictures and if you look at their stories, Howard Hughes had several children, actually.
Those two are two that gave us permission to use their information in the book.
And the two in the book, just remind me, how did you find them?
Did they come to you?
How did you get to them?
They came to us.
We had many, many people.
I've been working with a gentleman, Douglas Wellman, on this now for about eight years.
And they either came to me or came to Doug.
And then we had to kind of take that and say, now, do we believe what they're telling us?
Do we have some way to back it up?
Because what we've done in the book is everything's backed up.
We couldn't back up information.
We didn't put it in the book.
And so we went back to these children, learned more and more and more about them, discovered their stories, tried to understand their stories, went back into the DNA, got pictures.
And what we did find is Howard actually interacted.
He had more than just two.
Howard actually interacted with these children, most of them, when they were young.
He met with them.
Sometimes he traveled with them.
And so he did spend a fair amount of time with these children when they were younger.
And you said about the daughter, at least, that he had quite an involvement with her under an assumed name.
That's interesting, isn't it?
Yes.
Again, part of the hiding, part of the hiding away where he would use these other names to interact.
But she said, I knew it was him because he had way too much information for it.
I knew it was him.
As we trace that name back, that was an actual man who, amazingly enough, if you look back at his records, his death date is one week after Nick's death date.
The real Nick Nickely, the real Werner Nicely, died 15 November in 2001.
This gentleman died 21 November 2001.
So I thought that was interesting.
I don't know how you do that.
If he had a number of children and you've been in contact with two of them for the book, the new edition of the book, I'm very surprised that if you've got children all over the place, that we haven't heard much more about them before now.
Well, that is interesting.
Also, the one man was very reclusive.
His name was John.
He was also a very reclusive nature, and he really wanted no visibility at all of this.
We have his picture and Howard's picture in the book, and they're just almost exact identical in the book.
But Cindy actually tried.
She actually tried to enter in to some of the will proceedings in 1976 and beyond after he died.
They fought over that will proceedings for years.
She actually tried to enter into it saying, hey, I'm a child of Howard Hughes.
And she went to lawyers, she went to private investigators, and they basically were told, get out of it, don't go down that path, and kept her records.
And so everything that she tried to do was shut down.
Are you saying she was warned off?
Pardon me?
Are you saying that she was warned off?
She was pushed back.
Her lawyers and private investigators she went to were basically threatened.
They said, get out of it.
And because the cousins, Howard had a bunch of cousins who basically received money from the estate in 1976.
And they didn't want actually any children coming forward to divert from their getting that money.
If I was Howard Hughes, no matter how strange I was, and I had kids, at least one of whom I'd interacted with, that's Cindy, I would probably, because money is no object of you, Howard Hughes, I would want to look after them financially.
Do you have evidence that he did that?
I'm with you.
I think the children should have been looked at financially.
He didn't do any of it.
He never did anything financially responsible for his children.
He did help the parents they were living with, because many of these children were adopted through one of those CI adoption agency, And they were living with a family, and he did help some of those parents when buy property and things like that.
But as far as I know, he never ever helped the children financially, which is sad.
It is sad.
But it's also amazing that the story didn't get out there because if there are people there who think that they should be getting money because they're entitled to it and they're not getting money, then one of the first things some people might do is go to the New York Times or the National Inquirer or something and say, look, Howard uses my father.
Yes, yes, that's true.
I think they just were either afraid of it.
Some of them were threatened.
Some of them were shot at.
And so there's various reasons, I think, why they were afraid to do that.
And before people start saying that's really unlikely, and I don't believe that, we just have to pause for a minute, don't we, Mark, and think about the power this man always had.
I mean, look, he was, even when he was in the reclusive phase, as far as the media was reflecting, even in those years, everybody was talking about him.
I can remember being a little kid and seeing a rerun of a TV show called Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, you know, where they had gags, loads of them, about Howard Hughes.
He was still a big figure.
Oh, yes.
He was totally in the media.
If you look at that period of time in there from late 60s when he was buying all of those hotels and airports and TV stations in Las Vegas on, there's all kinds of magazine articles, all kinds of stuff in there.
And they're filled with drawings of what they think Howard should look like.
But none of them ever had pictures.
They never had actual pictures in there.
And so he was getting massive media coverage, much greater than any would ever even think about today during that period of time.
And for a reclusive man who wanted to hide, it wasn't something he appreciated.
You sent me a photograph of Eva's husband, Nick, in, I can't remember where it was taken.
It looked like it was taken on holiday somewhere, but he's wearing what we call here a pith helmet, you know, the kind of thing that jungle explorers wear.
And he's got a gray, curly beard.
It looks a bit of an unlikely photograph.
My first thought was, has this photograph been faked?
Well, let's talk about that a little bit.
It's a man standing out in woods, basically.
He has a 1950s Oil Riggers hat on, and he has a beard.
And so if you wanted to hide, you know, that's what you'd be hiding with, is that 1950 Oil Riggers hat, because you can't really see him.
And he never wanted his picture taken.
I took that picture to a man who traveled with Howard.
This was in the 70s and into the 80s.
A man who traveled with him on business type things.
A man who traveled with him and kept Howard's secret.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
And he said Howard didn't die, flat out didn't die.
I traveled with him.
And I gave him that picture and I said, okay, is this Howard Hughes?
And he looked at the picture and said, well, there's some resemblances with it.
And then he pulled out a magnifying glass and he looked at the eyes because the eyes are the only thing you can see on that.
You can't really see any other distinctive feature but the eyes.
And he put the magnifying glass down and said, 100%, this is Howard Hughes.
I said, how can you say that?
And he said, Howard Hughes had eye surgery.
This was in 1966.
Howard Hughes had eye surgery, and his right eye is slightly right.
And he said, this man's right eye is slightly right.
And so if you look at that picture and look at Howard Hughes', another picture, Howard Hughes' eyes, you got an exact match there of the eyes.
Nothing else can you really follow that means anything to me anyway.
Of course, sometimes people who claim to know can be fooled.
I'm right in thinking, aren't I, if the movie was correct, the manuscript of the fake Howard Hughes autobiography, a bunch of experts said, didn't they believe that that was so, that that could only have been written by Howard Hughes?
That's another interesting episode.
A man named Clifford Irving.
Clifford Irving came in in 1971.
Right, this is the man whose character was played by Richard Gere.
Yes, yes.
And basically said, you know, I'm writing an autobiography of Howard Hughes.
Howard Hughes then went on that telephonic interview.
It was early 1972, went on that telephonic interview to say, it's not true, it's full of lies, I didn't get permission, and so forth.
Now, interesting thing on this, Eva and Nick were living in Panama in December 1971.
They're living in Panama.
Eva noticed Nick was irritable, very irritable.
And she said, what's bothering you?
And he said, there's a book about ready to come out about Howard Hughes, and it's full of lies.
And Eva thought for a little bit and said, well, shouldn't the public know about that?
And he got this big smile on his face.
And it was that seven days later that he had a telephonic interview.
Eva heard the telephonic interview on the radio.
She recognized the voice.
She recognized the voice as Nick, the man she was married to.
And that night she said, Nick, that was you.
I heard the interview today.
That was you.
And he just smiled.
Right.
So where does that leave us?
Where does that leave us?
Sorry for interrupting, but where does that leave us with the fake autobiography then?
The fake autobiography, actually, as I piece that together, I think Howard did earlier authorize that autobiography.
And I think there might have been, this is my speculation now, totally.
I think there might have been some truth in that, but there also might have been some Hollywood in that.
And that's when Howard said, I don't.
I've never met this man, is what he said, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I think there might Have been some effort there by Howard to have this done to right some wrongs, but it never turned out that way for him.
The revelation of the children in the new book is dynamite, I would say, but then I'm interested, and I think it is.
What else is new?
Okay, let me talk a little bit.
There's a lapel pin that we have found in Eva's artifacts, and it says U.S. Congressional Advisory Board on it, a very nice lapel pin.
And so we've traced that back.
U.S. Congressional Advisory Board, who Eva would have never gotten that.
The identity of the man he took would never have gotten that.
And as we trace this back, it comes back to the 80s.
And so who got it to him obviously knew he was still alive.
And so there's that that's in there.
It's got a little bit more history on it.
But more important, there's a lady that came to us.
This was a lady from 1981 to 84.
She was a student at Troy University in Alabama.
She got to know them very, very well.
She would meet with them.
She worked for pharmacy and would take medications and things to the elderly and got to know them very, very well.
And he told her, I'm Howard Hughes.
And she just thought, this is not true.
It can't possibly be true.
And then she said his hands were burned, of which Howard Hughes' hands were burned.
He would actually pick up the mail from the post office.
And he was receiving mail from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
And she would deliver his postcards that Eva said he'd sent out postcards, which he would deliver them.
And so she knew where the postcards went and what they said.
And she was at the ranch.
He called it the ranch out there in Alabama, the wooded property.
She was at the ranch when visitors came.
And she recognized the visitors, and they were Howard Hughes' people.
And so he told her, I was in an aircraft accident.
That's how my hands got burned.
My feet got burned.
And so then he would give her assignments.
He'd give her things to go mail.
He'd give her packages to deliver and things like that.
And so he'd give her assignments to go do.
And so she came to us in 2011, first time, had not read the book, had not read the book, and told us, she heard about the book, told us about, you know, him about being Howard Hughes, about he's 6'4, his hands were burned, feet were burned, things like that.
And then she went silent on us, and then she came back in 2014 and just told us a whole bunch of things.
There's still things that she would not go into.
There's names that we brought up that she would not address.
But she basically told us lots and lots of information about this man being the real Howard Hughes.
So do you believe that the first book opened some kind of floodgates, Mark, and enabled people to come forward?
And if you think that is the case, are you expecting more to get in touch?
I wouldn't be surprised there's more because there's more out there.
When we put the first book out, we thought we knew a lot.
And now at this point, we knew maybe 50% of the story.
We now know maybe 70% of the story, but there's still more out there that we do not know.
Whether it'll come forward or not, I don't know.
Many people who have dealing with him have passed away or have reasons to hide it or have reasons why never to tell it.
Of course, one of the great American phrases that I've always loved is follow the money.
Now, with Howard Hughes, I mean, he is the man with whom you would want to follow the money.
If he was living with Eva in comparative obscurity, but still doing mysterious things, and she knows who he is eventually, and all the rest of it, as we've heard, he's still got to get money from somewhere.
So there is going to be a financial chain of paperwork or data somewhere, isn't there?
They lived, okay, they lived on, she had her Social Security, which wasn't a lot, but it would be something.
She had a civil service retirement, which wasn't a lot, would be something.
He was receiving an Air Force disability check that the identity that he took earned, but he was receiving it.
And then he had access to money.
She said he had a Chase Manhattan bank account.
He had access to money so that if it was needed, he could have it.
She said she never saw it, but he did it.
And so they had access to money.
On the other hand, if you're living in a trailer in a wooded property in Alabama, you don't need a lot of money.
And what we have found out was he just wasn't a material man at all.
He wanted money to buy power with.
He bought power with his money and could care less about the material things of life.
Well, look, you knew Eva.
I'm very surprised that even if she was a saint, a living saint, if you were living with somebody that you realized was Howard Hughes and had access to a lot of money, wouldn't you say to him, why have we got to live like this?
I can't live like this anymore.
Why don't you access some of the money and give us a life to which I'd like to become accustomed?
Exactly.
And she did that.
She did that as they're living out there.
She said, I'm tired of living out here.
This was in the early 90s.
She went into Troy, Alabama, and purchased a house in Troy, Alabama.
There's pictures of that house in the book.
And he came to the house and said, oh, I can't live here.
I can't possibly live here.
The roof is going to cave in.
The house is unsafe.
All of those things.
Well, there's nothing wrong with the house.
The house was a very nice house.
But he just couldn't live in that area.
And she ultimately, you know, sold the house.
But there'd be times when she would go places and escape from him throughout those years that they lived together.
But she did that basically.
But on the other hand, she loved him.
She loved him.
He was kind of an unlovable man, but she loved him.
And in the end, he loved her.
And so this thing actually turns into a love story also.
Two questions for you really.
I'm interested, of course, in him, but I'm very much interested in her too.
You can tell, can't you?
When you look at people, when you talk to them, when you've known them for a bit, you get a sense of whether they're telling you the truth.
So, point number one.
Throughout all of this, you were convinced, were you, that she was telling you the truth?
It took me four years to get to that point.
I spent four years researching this, going back, getting medical records, going back to where they lived, and didn't know what to believe.
In fact, one time Eva asked me, said, Mark, don't you believe me?
And I said, Eva, I didn't know what to believe anymore.
But then the revelation came to me, and this was in the summer of 2006, 2006.
The revelation came to me, she's telling me the truth, absolutely, because nothing ever changed.
And so in the summer of 2007, I actually took a man who does videos, and we went and interviewed her.
I interviewed her for about two and a half hours, three hours, and we videoed her.
And his name was Bill.
And I said, Bill, was she telling the truth?
Because I'm the only one she'd ever told this story to.
I had concluded after four years, it was true.
And Bill said, yes, she's telling the truth.
She's telling what she lived.
She's telling everything just like she experienced it.
She said, and so I was glad he said that, because if you'd have said, you know, I don't believe anything she says, then I'd have to go back and question my conclusion on it.
But what I have found is that everything that she's never said anything that wasn't true.
Everything that she ever told us was true.
Her story never changed.
In the eight years that I knew her, her story never, ever, ever modified or changed.
No detail changed.
And she died in 2009.
We were asking her questions up until two weeks prior to her death.
And she was answering them just like she'd answered them four or five years earlier.
At an earlier stage, okay, here's part two of what I wanted to say.
Did you never feel tempted to ask her to submit to a polygraph test?
No, I didn't.
First of all, I didn't ever have means of doing that.
And second of all, with my belief in her, I didn't think that would be of value.
Well, you see, that is what is going to get some of the skeptics listening to this shaking their heads.
They say, well, you know, of course you're going to say that.
Right, right.
Yeah, all I can say is go get the book, read it, and you conclude for yourself.
The book's written of, here's the facts.
You can decide for yourself if you believe it or not.
And so, and that's the way it's always been written because we tried DNA for years and years and years.
Work with the DNA expert, and he said, this man, Nick, wanted to hide, and he knew how to do it.
And we have concluded that.
But it's kind of, the book is electronic.
You can get it on Kindle, or it's at Amazon.com or WriteLife, W-R-I-T-E-L-I-F-E.com.
And so it's one of those books of it totally takes what you thought of history and throw it away because it just isn't true.
And you've almost got to read it for yourself.
That's right.
You're exactly right on that.
And the one hopeful thing about all of this is that very sadly, of course, Eva left us, as you said, in 2009.
But with the son and the daughter coming out of the woodwork and another person and other people perhaps starting to come out of the woodwork, you must be hopeful that there will be more to come.
Well, we think that there is.
We think that there is.
Another daughter came to us after we had this book ready to go.
And this was a daughter who actually traveled with him.
And when she was up to 16, he actually traveled with her.
And Eva told us things that he told her that we can never relate to anything.
And now with her story, it all becomes clear.
Those things that she told us now are related because this other lady has told us information which totally matches the things that Eva said about him.
And the two, and the son and the daughter in the book, and this new daughter who came after you'd put together this new book, you're absolutely sure these people don't know each other, didn't know each other before.
They certainly did not know.
No way.
No way.
Because we had to investigate each one of them.
In this latest one, I went back to Cindy and said, Cindy, I've got another person that's come to us.
She says, I know nothing about that.
And it had all been kept a very nice secret by Howard.
So as we wrap this up, Mark, what are you going to do next then?
You've got edition one of the book that we talked about five years ago.
Edition two is out now.
Is there going to be an edition three, and will there be material to put in it?
Well, we're collecting, we're continuing to collect material as it comes to us.
There could be an edition three, but we need something that goes over and above that he's got another child or two is what we need because those things are there, but they're not a reason to put out a whole nother book.
So there's stories out there, I believe.
We just need to get them, evaluate them, see how does it fit to this.
But we have no doubt this is no doubt at all this is 100% true.
There's too many facts in it and too much backup to not be true.
You said you found a congressional tie pin.
I think it was a tie pin, wasn't it, in the effects of EVA.
Were you not surprised that there weren't more things that could be tied back to, that could be traced back to Howard Hughes?
We've actually got some other things that we are tracing back that we're investigating.
It's surprising how hard it is to find some things out in history.
But that pen, the U.S. Congressional Advisory Board pen, we trace that back to the 80s.
And there was a U.S. Congressional Advisory Board effort in the first Reagan administration.
George H.W. Bush was vice president.
And a gentleman named Paul Laxalt was senator from Nevada who was very interested in promoting this U.S. Congressional Advisory Board.
Paul Laxalt and Howard Hughes had lots and lots of interaction when Howard was buying the hotels in Nevada.
So what we think, this is speculation, what we think is that Paul Laxalt, in his book, he says Howard Hughes was never recognized for his work in national security.
And what we believe, Paul Laxalt knew he was still alive.
Paul Laxalt gave him a pen and said, thank you.
Thank you for what you've done for the nation.
And so that's the only thing we can put together on that.
However, that pen does relate back to the 80s of which Howard was supposedly dead, but obviously people knew that he was not.
And the man Eva knew as Nick.
Was he buried?
Was he cremated?
He was cremated.
I wish he was buried.
He was cremated.
Of course, you cannot get DNA off cremation ashes.
But he passed away, was cremated.
The story is written around where I went with her and distributed his ashes in a beach in Florida where they lived.
And I kept, Eva asked me to keep some of these ashes, and so I kept them.
And I have the rest of the cremains myself for him.
Really?
Really?
Well, that's a tremendous responsibility, isn't it?
Yes.
Yes.
In fact, the documents and things that she has provided for us, you know, we've got all of those documents.
And we continue to get he was in the VA in Alabama, and we went back to the VA and got the records for 1999, 2000, 2001 of Nick Nicole, of Verna Nicely.
And he talks about he was still seven foot, he was still six foot tall.
He was still 72 inches tall, so he'd lost four inches, but he was taller than the man whose identity that he took, who was 71 inches at his height.
So this mystery, as they say, is ongoing.
It's ongoing.
And it talks about him being an only child.
It talks about his hobbies when he was younger, being an airplane, you know, flew airplanes.
It said his parents died young.
Everything in there matches Howard Hughes.
And what about, I mean, I've never really known, and I have read a certain amount about Howard Hughes.
Did he have family?
Were there other members of the Hughes family?
You know, there really weren't.
He had his parents and his grandparents, and they, of course, all passed away.
His parents, in the 20s, actually, they were all gone by the mid-20s.
And he was an only child.
And so, and it talks about he spent some time with his grandparents who lived in Kikuk, Iowa growing up.
But there really wasn't much other family.
There's a bunch of cousins there who he never really interacted with much.
And so he had some cousins on his mother's side, but didn't really interact much with them at all.
So it was a very small private family, actually.
So you can't be looking to family for leads because there's not really close family to look for and look to.
So as you said, the one thing that you could really do with right now is for another child to come forward and say, look, here's documentation.
Howard gave me this.
Right.
And we've got eight people that's come to us as a child of Howard Hughes.
Four of them we totally believe, absolutely totally believe.
Other ones might be there too, but we don't have as strong a belief as we do in the first four.
Well, whatever we can say about Howard, and I can say a lot because I bear his name with pride, he was a remarkable man, and he was a man of mystery.
He was definitely a man of mystery.
He loved confusion.
Very, very smart man.
He was a genius and could compartmentalize these things and keep everything separate.
He knew what he was doing, and Eva loved him.
I think that sounds, from the story that you tell, absolutely clear.
I've got a feeling we'll talk again, Mark.
If people want to read about you, find out about the book, have you got a website they can go to?
Okay, there is a website called Boxes, Howard Hughes Secrets.
And so there's a website on that.
It's also on Amazon.
The book's on Amazon available.
And it is one of those books that when you hear this story for an hour, you think, I don't know whether to believe it or not.
It took me four years to believe it.
But if you sit down and read the book, then you can conclude for yourself whether this makes sense or doesn't make sense.
Well, I'm keen to see the new edition.
I've got the previous one in my bookcase with my other Howard Hughes books.
And I don't keep a lot of books, but I kept that one.
So thank you for that, Mark.
And I wish you well with your work.
Well, Howard, thank you very much, and I've enjoyed this greatly.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Mark Music on the strange and remarkable life of the multi-multi-millionaire Howard Hughes.
And did he end as we thought he did?
Or did something else happen?
I guess the jury will always be out on that.
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