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On at least one point, a lapse in memory seemed especially odd. Hughes did not remember that retired U.S. Army Air Force Lieut. General Harold L. George had ever worked for him. Yet George had been a ranking executive of Hughes Aircraft Co. for several years until, with a group of prominent scientists and technologists, he departed the company following a spectacular blowup in 1953.
There are other inconsistencies and discrepancies. Clifford Irving's story is troubling on a number of points. Could Hughes, who by many accounts is almost hermetically sealed in his Paradise Island eyrie, have traveled to the mainland and to other places outside the U.S. for meetings with Irving over a period of nine months without the knowledge of his aides or of immigration officials? Irving replies: "Hughes is a flitter."
In order to leave the Britannia Beach Hotel, Hughes would probably have had to use the emergency stairs from his suites on the ninth floor, since the only elevators are in the center of the hotel. He could then have walked to the rear parking lot, where a Ford truck converted into an ambulance is always parked. Then he would have had to drive across the high, humpbacked Paradise Island bridge, which forms a narrow bottleneck between Paradise and the island of New Providence. On the return trip, he would have had to pass through a $2 toll gate. Leaving the island by boat would have been easier; he would probably have walked out the back of the Britannia to the beach on the ocean side of the island. The beach is unlighted, and a small boat standing beyond the shallows could have taken him off. Escape by air seems unlikely, since the hotel roof is not large enough to accommodate a helicopter. One landing on the lawn would amount to a five-alarm fire, for there are no helicopters regularly on the island.
Irving argues that the voice at the telephone press conference could not belong to Hughes, because Hughes could not withstand 2 hrs. of interviewing with only a few two-minute breaks. How, then, did Hughes find the stamina for his long sessions with Irving, quite aside from the tiring travel involved in getting to their rendezvous? (One answer: Irving says that Hughes was weak and ill only at the end of their months together.)
Other Scenarios. Hughes' life is so implausible and secretive that it invites extravagantly ingenious speculation. In the face of the certitude that someone is lying, these scenarios have been suggested:
THEORY I: TOTAL HOAX. Clifford Irving invented the entire autobiography. To do so, however, Irving would have to be a near genius of a writer. He would also have had to forge a body of documents, among them the Hughes letter to Irving acknowledging receipt of his book Fake!; four handwritten letters, including the nine-page letter to the McGraw-Hill president; and checks-made out to Hughes for $700,000 as payment for the book, endorsed by Hughes and cleared through a Zurich banking house called Credit Suisse. Irving would also have had to forge Hughes' handwriting in the extensive pencil editing that Hughes did in the margins of the original transcript. McGraw-Hill's Leventhal says