Bear Owen

A remarkably well told and compelling story of the double identity and secret life of the real Howard Hughes. The main assertion of the authors is that when Hughes began to slip from public view in the 1960s, he clandestinely assumed the identity of a dead CIA agent, Vernor Nicely, and substituted a body double for himself in Las Vegas so that he could quietly and permanently escape his public personna while still controlling his multibillion financial and manufacturing empire. The public was cleverly misled to believe that Hughes was the increasingly cadaverous drug addict wasting away in the penthouse atop a Las Vegas hotel. A chance meeting with a woman who had donated some modest real estate property to a charity run by one of the book's authors, Mark Musick, led to the unveiling of this fascinating and bizarre tale. The woman, Eva McClelland Nicely, needed help to obtain VA benefits for her military veteran husband which Mark was able to do. In the process, Eva Nicely established a bond of trust in Mark Musick that eventually led to her revelation to Mark that her husband was actually Howard Hughes! Of course Mark refused to believe her story which he thought to be the insane hallucinations of an otherwise kind elderly woman with a failing mind. Nevertheless, out of simple human curiosity, Mark started checking out details of Eva's story and was astonished to discover that all the verifiable details were true and corroborated by independent facts. After four years of helping Eva Nicely and listening to her story, Mark finally believed her, which started the investigatory project which led to the publication of this fascinating documentary book on the previously unknown last quarter of the eccentric billionaire's long and productive life long after he purportedly died in 1976. The scholarly research and documentation presented within the pages of the first and second editions of this book are impressively thorough and well supported. The vast majority of evidence is circumstantial, but all available personal testimony was included and it consistently corroborates the factual narrative. The evidence that Eva Nicely was actually Howard Hughes third and final wife is compelling. Admittedly I started reading the book with a deep bias of skepticism. I don't easily buy bizarre stories about secret lives of celebrities, and frankly most of them bore me to tears. But because of so many intriguing mysteries about Hughes' life, I tried to read "Boxes" with an open mind. The initial chapters did little to relieve my incredulity, but as I read further and the factual pieces of the complex puzzle began to fall into place, I was hooked. By the end, the authors had convinced me that Eva had told the truth. When she asked Howard why he trusted her not to spill the beans, he told her he wasn't worried, because no one would ever believe her. But now I do. I believe that Vernor Nicely was in reality, Howard Hughes. I also believe that Howard Hughes did not die in 1976. The emaciated human remains that lie in a Houston cemetery are not those of Howard Hughes. Read the book with a jaundiced eye, but an open mind. If you do you'll likely come to the same conclusions that I did.