Katharine Q. Seelye writes

On a long drive through the Nevada desert one night in 1967, Melvin Dummar spotted a scruffy man lying by the side of the road. He picked him up and drove him to Las Vegas. During the ride, he said, the man told him he was Howard Hughes.

The encounter might have been forgotten except for what happened nine years later, when Mr. Hughes, one of the richest men in the world, died. Mr. Dummar claimed to have received a copy of his handwritten will and, lo and behold, it said that Mr. Hughes had left him one-sixteenth of his estate, an estimated $156 million.

The revelation catapulted Mr. Dummar, at that point the owner of a gas station in Willard, Utah, to the center of a media circus. He was even the subject of a monologue by Johnny Carson on his late-night talk show. (Mr. Carson remarked that people all over the country would probably start picking up hitchhikers.)

Mr. Hughes died with no surviving immediate family and, according to his extended family, no will — which was why the document produced by Mr. Dummar, loaded with misspellings and incorrect information (unusual for the meticulous Mr. Hughes), caused such a sensation.