Hooey!
Writers look up odd things.
So I was looking up filthy Russian swearwords, and discovered that if you want to call someone a male member, and tell him to go male member himself, or stuff a male member in an unlikely orifice (Russian is a wonderful language for swearing in, or so I am told), the word is ‘huj‘ which is pronounced ‘hooey.’
Looking in my handy dandy circa-1950 dictionary, I see that the origin of the word hooey is merely noted as from the 1920s, origin unknown. Could the phrase have been wafted over here with immigrants from Eastern Europe?
(I trust only dictionaries written before 1950 or so. It defines “spaceship” as “an imaginary aircraft of the future for flight out of the earth’s atmosphere.” The later ones are corrupted with politically correct hooey.)