Just Getting Away From It All

Here's a good idea - if you're in the Air Force and you plan to abscond for, say, 35 years, you might want to drop into a local hair cuttery and see if you can get them to give you a different hair style or something.

William Howard Hughes (Howard Hughes?  really?) Jr, pictured twice above, phoned home to tell his parents that he was going to the Netherlands.  That was 1983 and his military task was to test aircraft surveillance systems for NATO. He packed his top security clearance and left his post at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

And then, when he left Holland after a few weeks, he was not seen again until the Air Force tracked him down at a place where he was living in California. Charged with desertion, and with owning and operating a sparse beard, he now awaits trial at an Air Force cooler. He was living under the alias "Barry O’Beirne," although he doesn't look like any O'Beirne I've ever known.

Just like in all the spy movies, investigators found his car at the Albuquerque International Airport, and inside his home was a to-do list and a list of books he wanted to read.

This should have been a clue. No man in real life has a to-do list, at least not one that he plans to do anything about.

And this was in the early days of everything in life being videoed...investigators found surveillance tape showing him withdrawing more than $28,000 from 19 different banks in the Albuquerque area.

And just like in the movies, his family figured he had been kidnapped, and the Air Force thought he might have gone over to the Soviets.

(For younger readers, there was a time when Russia was considered our deepest, most feared enemy. Imagine.)

His sister Christine said he never would have just split on his own.  "That would be totally out of character for the Bill we knew. We do not feel he disappeared voluntarily.”

He disappeared voluntarily.

After they tracked him down, the Air Force, with some justification, wanted to know why he left the joys of military life.

Hughes said he was “depressed about being in the Air Force.” That's why he left, becoming  O'Beirne, setting up a whole new world right in "plane" sight (He was in the Air Force, remember!) while all the while, his name was bandied about every time the there was some sort of catastrophe that could be blamed on the Russians, the idea being that the Russians were behind the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986, and the explosion of the Ariane rocket in French Guiana with info they got from the Man With Two Names.

The Air Force eventually admitted that Hughes was not carrying specific documents at the time of his disappearance, and they are not even sure IF anyone leaked classified information.

Linda Card, a spokeswoman for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, says the case remains under investigation.

“Until we have the whole story,” she said, “we don’t have the story.”

If they find Hughes/O'Beirne guilty, he could serve five years of confinement, forfeit all his pay and be dishonorably discharged from the Air Force.

But at least they FOUND him.