Goose Egg

This particular blooper has nothing to do with Apollo, but it deserves its own page if only because it offers a clue to the workings of David Percy's brain.

Page 244 of Dark Moon has a text box devoted to the flight of Howard Hughes' giant flying boat, popularly known as the "Spruce Goose." In Percy's words:

The timing of of the Spruce Goose maiden voyage has recently come into question. In the 1996 biography Howard Hughes the Untold Story, authors Brown & Broeske claim two dates for the test flight: November 2nd 1947 and November 2 1947 [sic], (which might be attributable to a printing error).

As a matter of fact, Peter Brown and Pat Broeske do give two different dates for the flight. Page 234 has the correct date of November 2, while the picture section between pages 114 and 115 has a UPI photo with the caption, "Hughes at the controls of the two-hundred-ton Spruce Goose during the history-making flight of November 4, 1947..." (New York, Penguin/Dutton edition, 1996). One should not read too much into this discrepancy; as David Percy so neatly demonstrated, misprints do happen.

Mistakes can also happen in the electronic media. Percy mentions that, "...in 1998 a British TV documentary The Secret History of Howard Hughes stated clearly that this test took place on July 28 1947...." To his credit, Percy shows some doubt about this British claim. Yet to his discredit he not only fails to verify the July flight date, but he spins it into the most outrageous theory one can imagine:

If the July 28 1947 timing of this event is correct, then it suggests that the lumbering wooden Spruce Goose was enlisted in the effort to banish the 1947 UFO flap, Roswell's flying saucer and rumours of ET bodies from the American press as well as the minds of the American people--for decades to come as it turned out.

So Howard Hughes' one-minute wonder was supposed to crowd out newspaper stories of alien invasions and keep people talking about nothing else for decades. If Percy's July 28 theory is correct, then the papers of the time should have been filled with accounts of the Spruce Goose. The July 28 flight date would be common knowledge; otherwise, how could it have been the successful distraction that Percy claims?

Yet this alleged July flight is not mentioned anywhere else. It is not found in any of the numerous Hughes biographies (such as Brown's and Broeske's) or in publications devoted to the Spruce Goose (e.g., Charles Barton's authoritative Howard Hughes And His Flying Boat, or the Spruce Goose website). Finally, the media for July 1947 make no mention of giant wooden birds.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. A person who can see invisible floodlights and hear whistles in his head should have no trouble imagining a raucous, 50-year-long media blitz that no one ever heard of.