Boxes: The Secret Life of Howard Hughes

Book Review-Boxes:The Secret Life of Howard Hughes

Eva’s Howard Hughes

as told by Major General (Ret.) Mark Musick, and written by Doug Wellman

It started with a comment left recently on one of my Hughes related blog articles telling me that Howard didn’t die in 1976.  It  was chilling to read because back in early April 1976, that’s what Richard had said to me…”Don’t worry.  That wasn’t Howard, it was one of his doubles.”  As one might imagine, with that one sentence,  Major General (Ret) Mark Musick had me hooked.

(To see Mark’s comment, click here: http://adriaen22.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/howard-r-hughesmysterious-billionaire/)

I immediately wrote back to him and a regular correspondence began.  The photo of a much older Howard (or possibly, a version of Howard?) was given to Mark by Eva and appears to the right. (Courtesy of Major General (Ret,) Mark Musick

I obtained a copy of Doug and Mark’s book hoping that it would shed light on the mystery of my friend Richard and his claims of being Howard Robard Hughes‘ illegitimate son…but it did not.  Instead, it added a thick, sticky layer of yet more mystery and confusion.  But let’s begin at the beginning…

Boxes: The Secret Life of Howard Hughes, tells the story of Eva McLelland, who at age 86, met Mark Musick through a chance business encounter and she decided to share her secret with him, and what a show stopping secret she had!  At first, as anyone would be, Mark was skeptical.  But over time, he began to realize that Eva’s stories and answers were earnest, confident and consistent.  Over time, she even shared her various documents with him and photocopies of Eva’s documents appear in the book.

According to Mark, she told him of meeting a very handsome man down in Panama at the Howard Air Force Base in 1969, a highly secretive and mysterious sort of guy.  He was always surrounded by a small cadre of men in suits which he never explained.  He was charming, highly intelligent, and breathtaking in a suit.  He was Howard Hughes, but he had an I.D. for a Nik Nicely.

However, the physical description of Nik Nicely on the I.D. did not match the much taller (and older) fellow whom she married one year later.   The mysterious Nik had trained her early on not to ask questions and not to expect truthful answers.  ”It’s better that you don’t know” was his typical response.  So, for a long time, poor Eva knew very little with any certainty.  In marrying this man, she had unwittingly crossed over into some kind of twilight zone existence, a feeling that I know all too well.

Eva described a man with bright blue eyes and a burn scarred hand, a man who was dying his black hair blond. Howard did have black hair, but his eyes were a dark brown, not electric blue….yet Howard did have a severely burned hand from the 1947 crash into a Beverly Hills neighborhood.   Blue eyes???

He was secretive and strange, often disappearing for weeks or months at a time, even after they married.  His absences always went unexplained.  Where’s Waldo?

I might have discounted her personal tale but for one critical detail.  She related an experience to Mark that links her firmly to Hughes and it is a detail that shocked me when I read it.  The experience involves a phone call that “Nik” helped Eva to make from Panama using a technology that simply did not exist at the time…a technology that Richard Hughes had described to me back in 1975.  This was a technology that was not to be released to the general public for many more years to come.

Eva was allowed to use a satellite phone.   In spite of the blue eyes, that one detail did it for me.  I began to believe.

There are several other details in Eva’s story that lend credibility to her tale and one in particular that shocked me as much as her story of using the satellite phone, but I will leave those for you to discover.  Hughes was a man of great mystery, after all, so it is fitting to leave some things unexplained, is it not?

Howard Hughes’signature-wikipedia

To order the book:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=boxes+the+secret+life+of+howard+hughes&sprefix=boxes+the+secret+%2Cstripbooks%2C332

To keep up with Boxes news and developments on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Boxes-The-Secret-Life-of-Howard-Hughes/132444330101175

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Wheel of Fortune|Roulette Angel Style

Wheel of Fortune and the Angel in the Casino

Throughout my life, from time to time, I have been graced by the presence of

An Angel

angels.  Mind you, I have never gotten to see them, but they have whispered to me.  Sometimes, the tickle of their breath against my ear has sent shivers down my spine.  One night, I heard them singing and I couldn’t get over the perfection of the harmony of their choir.  My bedroom window actually rattled with the lower notes.  There was no mistaking it for any hallucination.  It was spine tingling.  I could hear both the blended choir and each individual voice, simultaneously.  I told my mother about it the next morning, but she remained clearly skeptical of me.   Years later, as she drove home late at night on Sunrise Highway, she heard it too.  They were so loud that her car windows rattled.  It freaked her out, but I was forever vindicated when she shakily apologized to me for thinking me daft.

But what does this have to do with Roulette?  Or Hughes?

We were all quite broke, the four of us.  Richard Hughes called his adoptive parents who were living on social security and shamefully begged them for money.  The rent was overdue, the car payment was about to be due, and there was no food.  The money arrived the next day via Western Union.  Richard handed me the  crisp $100 bill and said “Here, take this to a casino and see if you can run it up.  If you lose it, it’s ok.”

Well, no, if I lost it, it wouldn’t be ok, not at all.  I reluctantly took hold of the bill and set out on my mission.  The other three remained at the apartment.

I decided to go to the Stardust (that will be important later) ….

I sat down in my favorite spot and cashed in the entire $100 requesting $5 chips which were pushed toward me in a neat stack.  I looked at my scrawny stash and I felt my heart sink; only twenty precious chips and no room for error.  The nearly crushing pressure of such overwhelming responsibility had me trembling with fear.  But I knew better than to play like that, so I fixed my stare on the spinning wheel, slowed my breathing down and silently asked to be given a number.  Getting myself to a level of deep relaxation was key.

Suddenly, I was out of my body, floating close to the ceiling, looking down at the wheel, the table, the lady to my left, the stacks of chips, ash trays and cocktail glasses, and other players at the far end of the table.  The dealer released the ball and it sped around the wheel.  Then the voice came in the usual soft whisper from my left side…”seven”, it told me. I willed my body to pluck a single, precious five dollar chip from my stack and placed it on seven…and seven it was.  Pay the lady….$5 x 35.  I watched myself reach out and take the chips.  Then the voice softly spoke the next roll…ten.  If only I had done what I saw Craig do…reinvest the bet…if only.  But instead,  I drew a single $5 chip and slid it over number 10…pay the lady, $5 x 35.

But then there came a silence, a terrible silence.  I was puzzled by the silence.  What is the number?  O or OO, no doubt.  I did not place a bet that roll and the number was OO.  Nobody had covered the zeros on that roll…house takes all.

The dealer swept the table with his arms and quickly gathered up all the chips and rapidly stacked them…but I had no chips among them, having withheld my bet.  And then the voice spoke to me one last time.  Again, I bet just a single $5 chip…and again, pay the lady.  But then, something dreadful happened.  The woman seated to my immediate left finally noticed that I was betting  just a single chip each roll and hitting every time.  She became excited and stretched to be ready to follow my next bet but as she stretched, her ample bosom knocked over my pool of stacked chips and the noise of the cascade broke my “float”.

I fell back into my body with a thud, turned and scowled at the woman, and then angrily demanded to cash out.  I was so angry!   But I knew that I had covered the rent and the car and that there would be plenty left to buy food for awhile.  My fury turned to gratitude by the time I reached the apartment.  That money brought such relief to everyone.

Boccaccio’s Lady Fortune

Had I the utter, unshakable faith that Craig had, had I kept on reinvesting the bet, everything would have been different.  But I didn’t. Even heaven couldn’t save me from my own fear.  Mastering that lesson lay well in the future.  The universe just keeps handing you the same lesson over and over again until you conquer it, at which point it calls up the next big lesson and the game begins anew.

Ultimately, the only thing that any of us has the potential to control is our own personal consciousness, our own personal fears, and how we go about the business of our own personal growth.  The universe will always grab hold of our greatest fears and shove them in our face.  That, my friends, is the basic program that runs silently in the background as the wheel of life spins round and round.  What are your deepest fears and what will you do with them?  How will you play the hand that you are dealt?

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Roulette Las Vegas Style

Image via Wikipedia

When I first moved to Las Vegas, I preferred playing Roulette at the Hilton.

Because I am so short, I take the second seat from the wheel whenever I can get it.  Chair number two affords me access to all the numbers without tipping my bottom to the world.  What I saw one night will stay with me until the day I die.

I was sipping on my Smith and Curran, betting the minimums, not doing poorly, and not doing well.   In the distance, a short, muscular square jawed man began to approach the wheel.  He was middle aged and really shouldn’t have been wearing his shirt quite so tight, nor with so many buttons undone.  Grayish chest hairs curled around a thick gold chain and a pendant of the number “32”.  He said his name was Craig and that he loved number 32.

He sat squarely on the chair at the foot of the board and I remember thinking that he’d have trouble placing bets up at the top end where I was.  He cashed in for $100 chips, two stacks of them. , and then he reached into his pants pocket and drew out a piece of green cloth which he placed squarely in front of him.  It was a section of old Roulette board felt of the number “32”.  He placed several $100 chips straight up on number 32…no other bets.  “Idiot”, I thought.  The ball began to spin around, around, around.  At last it began its decent toward the number wells….ping, ping, ping, plop….32, no way!  I watched the dealer counting up the considerable winnings, and then slide them over to Craig.  Craig threw back some of the black chips to the dealer, took back his original bet, and then stacked all the rest on 32.  In essence, Craig was letting it ride…insane.

Once again…around, around, ping, ping, plop, 32.  Bullshit!!! But once again, Craig was paid a fortune.  He tried to let it all ride again, but the pit boss was summoned.  The betting limit was explained to Craig, so he adjusted his wager…yeah, number 32…only number 32…and yes, it hit again.  By this point, I was in such a state of shock and disbelief that I was unable to calculate the odds against the number 32 coming up three times straight, much less the amount of money sitting in front of Craig.  They had stopped paying him in chips by that point (he had them all) and were giving him notes instead.

He bet the table limit on 32 once again, for the fourth time.  My entire being was trembling…what if 32 hits again?  It’s so damned unlikely.  But so were rolls one, two and three.  I had reached a critical point.  I was beginning to believe.   When 32 hit for the fourth time, Craig threw a pile of his blacks to the dealer and abruptly stood up to cash out.  He strode away, reeking with triumph.  I am sure that he marched straight to the cashier’s cage.  This experience taught me a big lesson about blind belief in odds.  And I swear that lesson has served me well ever since.  Nearly two years  later, I was destined to have my own Craig moment.

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Hughes Resonance-Ripples in the Water

I recently found this article written in 1946 that chronicles Hughes’ infamous

Hughes Survived This

crash into a Beverly Hills neighborhood.  There are photos of the wreckage which impacted me (no pun intended)>  The crash occurred on July 7, 1946.http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/XF-11_crash_site.htm

Hughes finished his spectacular slide in the back of the house at 803 Whittier Dr as you will see from the map in the article.

Now, in 1985, I went to work for the magnetic and enigmatic Dennis Holt at Western In’l Media Corp.  Somewhere in the late 1980′s around the time that Dennis married my ex PGW co-worker, Brooks Oliver, he bought the house at 820 Whittier, a few doors down from the place where Hughes had crashed 40 years earlier.

I had worked with Brooks at PGW in the late 1970′s and she often mentioned that she wanted to live on Whittier Drive. When you wish upon a star…

Anyway, Media Director Jody Caldwell,  the woman who made behemoth Western In’l into what it was operationally, was in her late 60′s by the time I started working there.  She liked me quite a bit and one day when we were shooting the breeze in her office, she started telling me about her childhood and such. I was totally unprepared to hear her casually tell me that she had worked as Howard Hughes’ personal secretary on Romaine Street.  But she just went silent and would not respond to my excited questions. She just looked down at her desk and clamped her mouth shut.  Oops. It seems that Hughes’ command for secrecy extended well beyond the grave.  But then again, he wasn’t really dead yet, was he?

Hughes Headquarters

In the 50′s, Hughes lived in a house located on the property of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas.  I am, by the oddest of odd coincidences, one of the few private citizens ever invited to stay in that house overnight.  This happened in the early 1980′s.  The television station that Hughes owned, KLAS-TV, was just a few yards away.  The history of the Hughes house can be read here: http://www.8newsnow.com/story/964897/history-of-the-klastv-howard-hughes-house

The national sales manager of KLAS had invited me to stay overnight in the house.  I was invited back again in 1997 by the KLAS news director. The house had been changed into a private museum by then so sleep over privileges were no longer extended to anyone. Instead, I got a private tour.  A large map of Las Vegas from the 50′s covered one wall.  I marveled at the barrenness, the absence of roads and homes.  It was wide open space, just a great expanse of desert scrub.  I reflected on how the city looked back in the 70′s when I had  lived there.  The east-west  axis street of Sahara was well developed at that time but not much else.  With the exception of the strip, it was a dusty, ugly, scrubby, soulless  little town.

So, to recap, I go to work for a guy who buys a house in the neighborhood that Hughes had crashed into, find out that his Media Director used to be Hughes’ personal secretary, sleep in Hughes’s Las Vegas house, am invited to tour the house again when it became a private museum, and spent three years with one of his purported illegitimate children a decade earlier…hmmm.

Coming up:

The Glomar Explorer and the things that Richard said about the Soviet K129….and the Spanish galleon…and the gold.

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The Faked Death of Howard Robard Hughes

I was sharing an apartment in Las Vegas with Richard

Image via Wikipedia

Robard Hughes in April 1976 and when the news hit regarding Howard Hughes’ “death”, Richard assured me that Howard was still very much alive.  It was one of Hughes’ doubles, a heroin addict, that died down in Acapulco, Mexico, he said.  It wasn’t long before a flurry of Howard Hughes wills  hit the Las Vegas probate court.  The Mormons had one, Melvin Dummar had one.  Hell, even Richard had one.  To my memory, the court ruled in favor of the Summa Corp./Mormon will at the time but the Loomis side of Hughes’ family filed a challenge.  I do not know who prevailed in the end.  I can only say that it wasn’t Richard.

Apparently, there is a Harry Hughes who also claims to be an illegitimate son of Howard Hughes who, like Richard, claims to have an implant near his eardrum that connects to a satellite.   Here is an interview with Harry. 

Notice how you want to discount him because of the fantastic meanderings.  To me, this says that he has been programmed with disinformation, possibly in order to distract from a few kernels of truth that he embodies in his tale, such as the ear implant which Richard did have.  It is important to somebody, somewhere that poor Harry comes off as being utterly insane.  This little video of Harry does a very good job of connecting the concept of satellite linked ear bud and “insane”.

I will say that Richard was a great deal more grounded than this Harry fellow.  Richard was always measured, factual and specific as well as in possession of documents that supported his claims. It is Harry’s claim of having that satellite-linked implant that captures my attention.  Harry mentions Katharine Hepburn and rumors of her having a son which he surmises might be himself, but he bears no resemblance to her.  Richard, on the other hand, has her facial structure and complexion.

Katharine Hepburn

 After Howard’s April ’76  ”death”,  Richard told me that Howard visited Las Vegas from time to time but that he wore disguises…changed his appearance with makeup and false noses and other rubbery apparatus that Howard had on hand, procured from his Hollywood studio days.  One day, I was playing roulette and a man sat down at the table.  He looked very odd and I stared at him quite a bit.  He wore a tool belt with some common items hanging from it…hammer, flashlight, screw drivers.  When I got back to the apartment, Richard asked me if I had recognized Howard.  I told him about the odd man at the table with the tool belt.  He said that was him, that he was in town and that it was Howard at the table…that the belt was a pun of sorts…a play on “Hughes Tool Co.”.  But truthfully, to this day, I have never been sure of anything surrounding Richard Hughes nor the off looking man at the table.

Of all that Richard told me, the story of the Glomar Explorer has always been my favorite.  It involved a Russian sub (the K129), a Spanish galleon, and gold…lots of gold.  And there was the messy incident at the Watergate Hotel that brought down President Richard Nixon.  Howard was the man behind the scenes pulling the strings on so many interesting puppets.  And Howard was ever so tight with the CIA.  Just try to imagine the mischief quotient of that particular combination.

Image via Wikipedia

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Richard Robard Hughes|The Double

Richard Robard Hughes-Playing Doubles

Uday on left,Latif Yahia right

I can’t remember exactly when it was that Richard introduced me to the concept that he had a double.    “His name is Jim.  He got picked because he had my basic bone structure.  The doctors did work on him and he is so close in looks to me, he really is.  It’s hard to tell us apart”. “They pay Jim quite a lot”, he chuckled. Like everything else he told me along the way, I took it with a grain of salt.  It was all so utterly fantastic, my young Long Island brain really could not successfully process it.

Richard’s favorite sandwich was the Monte Cristo and he especially liked the one they made at the MGM Grand coffee shop.  I had never heard of a Monte Cristo sandwich before the day he met me for lunch and he ordered one.  When it arrived, he started eating it with a knife and fork.  “Why don’t you pick it up like a sandwich?” I inquired.   He smiled a little “you bumpkin” smile and explained that it is hot, fresh from being deep fried, and it is properly consumed with cutlery.  Point made.

Several weeks later, I was summoned once again to meet Richard in the MGM coffee shop where he once again ordered the Monte Cristo.  The conversation that day was decidedly different, dull and perfunctory.  He seemed very guarded, distracted and measured which he never had before.  He had always been open and eager to flood me with information, but this day was different.  His answers were brief, strained and he looked down a lot.  His complexion seemed off to me but I fought the idea that this might be the double….that there really WAS a double.  I shook the thought away and carried on with the mundane chit chat.  The sandwich finally arrived and he shocked me by picking it up with his hands.  I blurted out “Aren’t you going to use your knife and fork?”  He paused and looked at me with a genuine look of being perplexed.   I started to really study his face and it didn’t quite look like him, but then again it did.  I found myself  wondering, my disbelief wavering.

The next day, one of Richard’s insiders named Charley came by and chided Richard that he had run into his double, Jim, at the airport the previous morning.  “I kept saying hello but you didn’t seem to recognize me so it had to be Jim that I saw.  He looks just like you!”  I found myself wondering about the Monte Cristo sandwich all over again.

Richard told me that Howard had doubles as well.  I had read that somewhere about Howard.  Maybe it was in the Gemstone Files.  But one never knows what to make of such things.  There is always a strong tendency toward skepticism.  But then, just a couple of months ago, I saw the movie “Devil’s Double”, a true story of a man who closely resembled Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday and was forced to serve as his double after receiving some plastic surgery.  Saddam was portrayed as having a double as well.   I am thinking that the guy in the coffee shop really didn’t know how to eat a Monte Cristo after all.  And I am wondering about Bin Laden, Khaddafi….without the insider’s playbook, who knows who is who… and who is where.

To be continued…

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Howard R. Hughes|Mysterious Billionaire

Howard Robard Hughes

and the strange case of Richard Robard Hughes

Howard Handsome Hughes

When I was young, Howard was always in the news, most often for refusing to testify before Congress or for buying another Las Vegas casino.  I grew up and married.  Hughes had become utterly eccentric by then, hiding away on the top floor of his Desert Inn hotel and then running off to Nicaragua.

I could not have imagined that my life would have intersected with his.  I was just a little girl from Long Island.

The quirkiest time of my life had to be the Hughes years, although several other segments have come close to qualifying.  It all started with a tarot card reading.  I was young and new to Las Vegas.  I became friends with a Japanese girl named Machi and when she learned from my husband that I could read tarot, she clamored for a reading.  Her cards were unfortunate, predicting an immensely traumatic event in the near future and when it came to pass, she told everyone.  Suddenly, I was in demand and I found myself at the home of a meticulous Japanese housewife named Maria, cards spread before me, seeing something just a little outrageous.

I struggled to understand what I was seeing….”you are surrounded by money, but you can’t get your hands on any of it”.  She gasped, then rattled off the craziest story, a story that I was on the precipice of stepping into. a story that would go on for three years.  Alice down the rabbit hole, skirts a billowing.

“Papa knows a man”. (She always referred to her American husband as papa) “He is Richard Robard Hughes, the illegitimate son of Howard Hughes.  He is hiding from the FBI.”  And so it began.  “When Richard comes back to Las Vegas, I will introduce him to you.”

I learned that he was being sued by a man in New Mexico (Mr. Swann) for defrauding him of a significant amount of money.  Richard’s stance was that he borrowed the money predicated upon a transfer of funds promised by his biological father, Howard R. Hughes.  During the trial, it was asked of Richard how, precisely, he communicated with his “father” and Richard replied that he had a transmitter in his ear and received communication via satellite. It was 1973!!!!   Officially, there was no such technology at that time, .  He submitted to an x-ray and indeed there was a small fuse-like object close to his ear drum. I was shown the x-ray and I saw the object clearly. That was early in 1975.  And there STILL was no such technology, but there it was.

Richard fled New Mexico when the court refused to accept his x-ray as proof of having a highly sophisticated and technologically advanced device implanted in him.  His lawyer had tried to subpoena Hughes but Hughes did not appear as ordered leaving Richard alone to face the wolves.  Richard decided to run and he ran to Las Vegas   And that’s where the adventure began, skirts a billowing.

Continues here:

http://adriaen22.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/richard-robard-hughes/

Richard Robard Hughes

Image via Wikipedia

Richard Robard Hughes

Ms Hepburn-Lion in Winter

I eventually met Richard.  I arrived at Maria’s and there he was, a very corpulent man dressed in what looked like military fatigues.  From the way he was dressed, he reminded me of Fidel Castro, right down to his cap and fat cigar.  I met with him many times after that and we became friends.  Over time, he told me many things.  And the things that he told me shocked me and opened my eyes.  Through him, I learned that the world we know, or think that we know, isn’t real at all

Richard Hughes was born in September of 1945 and was never sure who his mother was.  But he sure did look a lot like Katharine Hepburn.  He showed me his birth certificate.  The mother’s name was redacted, showing only the name of the father who was clearly stated as Howard Robard Hughes. He also showed me his adoption papers from the Edna Gladney Home for Foundlings, Dallas-Ft. Worth.  He told me that I was holding the only copies in existence because the Gladney Home had no record of him ever being there and his birth certificate was missing from the Dallas- Ft. Worth records. Curious…reminds me of Barak Obama.

A friend of mine was working as an investigative journalist for a popular national magazine.  I told her the story of the Gladney paperwork issue and she gasped.  “I have been working on an article about the CIA and one of my sources actually told me that the Gladney Home was used to discreetly redirect inconvenient and embarrassing “situations” back when abortion was illegal.  The CIA used it to protect the reputations of their own daughters in addition to those of influential persons.  That is entirely possible!”  I was stunned by her confirmation.

As an infant, Richard was adopted from the Gladney Home by a couple who lived in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  He grew up there having no idea about who his father was.  His adoptive parents, Pat and Maureen, were of very modest means and he was their only child.  From time to time when he played in the schoolyard, he would notice men in suits across the street who seemed to be watching him.  They never spoke to him, they never bothered him; they just watched him.

But one day they did speak to him.  They told Richard that they were going to take him to meet his father.  He was taken to Los Angeles to the home of Billy Wilder, the famous movie director.  Howard had been in the movie business back in the late 1940’s.  Hughes had inherited a fortune from his father, the founder of the Hughes Tool  Company, manufacturer of an innovative drill bit that was used in oil rigs.  It was that superior drill bit that brought Howard into contact with the oil men of his generation and gave him the capital to start gobbling up companies such as RKO Pictures.  Howard became acquainted with Wilder during his RKO years.  And it was in Wilder’s living room that Richard learned who he actually was.

To be continued

(see previous Hughes article at http://adriaen22.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/howard-r-hughesmysterious-billionaire/)