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UFO- Seeking Soldiers Charged With Dissertion
UFO-SEEKING SOLDIERS CHARGED WITH DESERTION
GULF BREEZE, Fla. - Six soldiers, reported to be on an unofficial mission to
kill the Antichrist, were charged Thursday with desertion from their
intelligence unit in West Germany, a Pentagon spokesman said.
A friend told one of the newspapers that one of the soldiers arrested in this
Florida Panhandle city, a hotbed of UFO sightings, was interested in
unidentified flying objects and wanted to attend a UFO convention in nearby
Pensacola.
Army spokesmen did not immediately return calls concerning the newspaper
reports.
The five men and one women, all members of the 701st Military Intelligence
Brigade at Augsburg, West Germany, are being held at Fort Benning, Ga. They
were arrested Friday and Saturday after police stopped one of them for a
traffic violation.
They were charged with desertion rather than the lesser offense of being
absent without leave because they help top-secret security clearances, said
spokesman Pete Williams at the Pentagon.
The six are being segregated from other prisoners at the Fort Benning stockade
but otherwise are treated like other inmates, said Lt. Col. McDonald Plummer
Jr., a spokesman for the post. He said the parents of three of the alleged
deserters tried to
telephone them, but the soldiers refused to take the calls.
A counterintelligence investigation is being conducted as a matter of routine
because the six, all analysts assigned to intercepting, identifying and
exploiting foreign communications, had handled classified material, military
spokesmen said.
"There still appears to be no independent evidence of any espionage or
security related problem here," Williams said Thursday.
A member of their unit told the newspaper Stars and Stripes that the six were
out to find and destroy the Antichrist, the figure the Bible says will
challenge Christ. He spoke on the condition his name would not be disclosed.
Maj. Joe Padilla, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, Wednesday retracted an
earlier statement that the six were members of a group known as "The End of
the World."
But Stars and Stripes quoted the soldier from the Augsburg unit as saying that
the cult has additional members in the area.
"There are others who are upset because they didn't get invited" to go along
on the search for the Antichrist the newspaper quoted the soldier as saying.
The six have been identified as Pfc. Michael Hueckstaedt, 19 of Farson, Wyo.;
Pfc. Kris Perlock, 20 of Osceola, Wis.; Pfc. William Setterberg, 20, of
Pittsburgh; Specialist Vance Davis, 25 of Valley Center, Kan.; Specialist
Kenneth G. Beason, 26, or
Jefferson City, Tenn.; and Sgt. Annette Eccleston, 22 of Connecticut, hometown
unavailable.
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