It's hard to make any sense of this. Heck, some of the top investigators in the country were apparently unable to figure it out:

By the age of 33 [William Howard Hughes] was a captain at Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he gained top secret access, working on a NATO program that controlled missile launches and missile warning systems.

Hughes bought a modest home in Albuquerque near the base and lived alone. In July of 1983 he was transferred to the Netherlands for a short trip to work on the same technology there. He was due to report back to Kirtland on Aug 1.

Hughes never returned to his air base. ...

Spoiler alert: Dude just up-and-vanished. I mean into complete and total thin air.

Military officials knew at the time that there was a good possibility that Hughes had defected to the Russians; indeed, several flight disasters in subsequent years, including that of the Challenger, were attributed to possible meddling by the Russians using Hughes's intel.

All of those theories sort of petered out, though, and everyone pretty much forgot about him ("a search through the archives," the Chronicle notes, "reveals William Howard Hughes' name was not mentioned once in the press between 1987 and 2017").

Then this happened:

In June 2018, US Department of State special agents traveled to Daly City on a passport fraud investigation to interview a man living as Barry Timothy O'Beirne.

"After being confronted with inconsistencies about his identity, the individual admitted his true name was William Howard Hughes Jr., and that he deserted from the U.S. Air Force in 1983," the Air Force news release read.

The State Department when they realized who they'd stumbled across:

When pressed, Hughes claimed that "he became depressed about being in the Air Force back in 1983, so he simply left, changed his identity and has lived in California ever since." You know, as one does.

But still, there are just too many unanswered questions here:

Why did Hughes not just resign his commission in the Air Force? What pushed him to change his identity and cause his family pain for decades? Was it just a coincidence that a captain with top secret clearance working on highly classified missile tech became disillusioned with the work and walked out at the peak of the Cold War, without telling a soul?

All very good questions!

Unfortunately, it looks like we'll never get our answers:

William Howard Hughes' current whereabouts are unknown.

Well if you happen to be in the San Francisco area and you see this guy, see if you can get some answers from him!

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