The Gulf Breeze Six

On July 9, 1990, six US military intelligence analysts from the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade at Augsburg, West Germany, at that time the biggest NSA (National Security Agency) listening post in the world outside the United States, deserted their posts, somehow convinced that the end of the world was nigh. It is one of the most extra-ordinary stories…

Philip Coppens

On July 20, 1990, the Northwest Florida Daily News ran “6 AWOL SOLDIERS SAY THEY AIMED TO KILL ANTICHRIST”, continuing: “Gulf Breeze - Six soldiers, reported by an unofficial military newspaper to be on a mission to kill the Antichrist, were charged Thursday with desertion from their intelligence unit in West Germany, Pentagon spokesman said.” It was a most bizarre headline and one of the most bizarre stories… ever.
Eleven days earlier, Spc. Kenneth Beason, Spc. Vance Davis, Sgt. Annette Eccleston, Pfc. Michael Hueckstaedt, Pfc. Kris Perlock and Pfc. William Setterberg went AWOL – absent without leave from the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade. The group left their station in Germany, travelled to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they bought a van, and drove to Gulf Breeze, Florida, at the time a noted UFO hotspot. Still, it was not initially clear whether the UFO sightings in the area were linked with their desertion, if only because most of these men had done their basic training at Curtiss Station in nearby NAS (Naval Air Station) Pensacola, which meant that they were familiar with the area.
Five days after their flight, on Saturday July 14, a broken taillight on the van resulted in a routine traffic stop, and Hueckstaedt, the driver of the van, was detained by police when a computer check indicated that he was wanted for desertion. The remaining five were later rounded up and taken to Fort Benning, Georgia, where they were kept in solitary confinement, incommunicado. Their fate – a possible execution – hung in the balance, until their families leaked their predicament to the press, resulting in reactions from Senators Casman and Dole. Surprisingly enough, three weeks after their arrest, instead of being severely punished by a military tribunal, they were discharged from Fort Knox – with full honours! Following Colin Powell’s dissent to this incredible verdict – after all, they were deserters – this was withdrawn. Instead, they were reduced to the lowest rank and forfeited half a month’s pay. Since, military officials have refused to discuss the investigation.

What was going on? A Pentagon spokesman stated that the six were members of a group called “The End of the World”, but this statement was later retracted, saying that there was no such group. When the case was declassified, 1400 out of 1600 pages were withheld.
The case is intriguing – to say the least. Some believed that these people were simply mad and that the Military merely wanted to sweep everything under the carpet – both parties were already sufficiently embarrassed. Others argued that the six were the subjects of an advanced military mind control experiment. After all, wasn’t this the perfect test? Top – top top even – military security experts… wouldn’t the military want to know whether there were certain things that would make such people desert? And before finding out whether this would work on the enemy, it surely had to be tested on the own troops? In an as real as possible setting…

Speculation was now rife. One trend had it that UFOs were at the core of the mystery. It was said that Beason was interested in UFOs and wanted to attend a UFO conference. The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) did hold its 21st annual symposium in Pensacola on July 6-8, but as the group apparently only defected on July 9, this obviously would have been the worst organised trip ever. Furthermore, who would risk their life just to attend a UFO conference?
Still, one Stan Johnson, a Morristown photographer, said in a telephone interview with the Pensacola News Journals, that he had picked up Beason and Hueckstaedt on July 6 at the McGee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tennessee – three days before the official version had them desert. Either Johnson was lying, wrong on dates… or the “official story” was wrong. Though Gulf Breeze Police Chief Jerry Brown stated the soldiers did not arrive in the area until July 9, Beason was said to have spent the night of July 7 with his sister and her husband, Caroly and Charles Reed, at their home in Talbott, Tenn., according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel. So… was the true purpose of their visit to attend the UFO conference? And if so, why did the official version change the dates? At best, it did not make sense… At worse, it was incomprehensible.

Vance Davis

A first hand account that could shed light on the story was provided in 1995, when Vince Davis published “Unbroken Promises”. The book is probably one of the most mind-boggling works ever written, irrelevant of the fact whether it is the total truth, or an “enhanced version” of it. If the mind boggles already, jaws drop when you read the Davis book.
Davis states that as a teenager, he had enrolled in Silva Mind Control courses that were held in Alex Merklinger’s school in New York, and mastered techniques of self-hypnosis through active imagination. During one of his trances, he met a green-skinned, yellow-clad alien female named Kia, who, over one night, corrected his flat-footedness. Davis said that Kia “told me that she came from a planet forty-five light years away from Earth, that had been destroyed by another race. Her race, the Kiasseions, were telepaths that were enroute to Earth to assist the Alliance in protecting the human race. They were scheduled to arrive by late 1992. The Kiasseion civilization had been reduced to five spacecraft carrying about three thousand people per ship […] Her husband had been killed, and she had taken his place as Commander of this small armada, with her two grown sons in charge of two of the remaining ships.” Kia became Vance’s guardian.
Nothing unusual so far, if at least you are familiar with what many other channelers have stated about their contacts. But Davis held the “toppest” security clearances in the country.

But what caused them to go AWOL? “Ouija board sessions.” According to Davis, the Ouija board put the six soldiers in touch with an entity that named herself Safire, and others, including those presenting themselves as the Old Testament prophet Zechariah, Mark and Timothy of New Testament, and the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.
Between December 1989 and July 1990, the Ouija-summoned spirits gave the group a series of predictions of coming world events which, Davis claims, were passed along to military authorities upon their arrest, together with the copious notes that were taken by the group during the eight Ouija sessions. This at least suggests that the story was true and not fabricated by the group upon their arrest: they could provide documents that Ouija sessions were at the basis of their obsession to arrive in Florida.

When some of Safire’s prophecies, both minor and significant, started to come true, one stating the exact dynamics and the number of casualties of a mayor earthquake in Iran (292,236 deaths), it convinced the six that they were dealing with genuine trans-human encounters. They felt that they were chosen to act as instruments of God’s will – their oath to the military “obviously” seemed to be of less importance than following the orders of God. They asked Safire how to carry out their divine mission. Safire instructed them to flee the military, regardless of consequences, because they were needed to help lead the world through an impending cataclysm. So they did.

Davis states that in 1989, he “began to sense that the lines of demarcation between the physical world and the spiritual one were beginning to blur.” It is here that we need to introduce Beason, who was even more instrumental in the group’s flight. He believed in reincarnation and believed that he had been sacrificed to the gods in a previous life. He also believed that the US government was in cahoots with aliens and that evidence for this could actually be found in Augsburg, the NSA site where they worked. It was also Beason who knew Anna Foster, at whose house in Gulf Breeze most of the groups would later be hiding – and arrested. He was in love with her.

This explains the setting of the desertion, but not the reason. Was it true that they had come to Gulf Breeze to see UFOs? To attend a UFO conference? Davis states that Safire warned them of a coming war. Mankind was about to make an evolutionary step, which is why many alien entities were in orbit, on or under the earth – and/or in telepathic contact with the likes of him. There were two alien groups: the Alliance, the good guys, who believed in free will, and “the Others”, who were abducting people and performing medical experiments on them. Safire “confirmed” to the group that the US government was in cahoots with the aliens, as they had suspected all along.
On an eschatological level, she stated that 1998 would be the date for the false Messiah to make his appearance; the year was three times his number (666). She told them to leave Europe, as there was (in the early 1990s) going to be a US-European conflict, which would make it hard for the group to continue their learning – and would endanger the role they were told they would play during the upcoming evolutionary step. They would leave Europe asap, hide out, before beginning their new life. Their choice for a hide out fell on Gulf Breeze. Not because of UFOs, but because they knew the area and Anna lived there.

When they deserted, each left a copy of the letter dictated by the spirits, in the hope that the letter might make its way into the hands of the president – so that he would know of the dire times ahead. But despite the fact that the survival of the world was at stake, it seems that destiny still had time to have love play its game. Davis had had visions of his “Soul Mate” when he was a teenager. It is when they arrived at Anna’s house, that Davis saw his “Soul Mate”: it was Anna’s roommate, Diana, whom he recognised from the visions more than a decade before.

If the spirit world was guiding them, leading them away from harm, why were they eventually captured? “Safire had told us that Gulf Breeze would be safe until Friday. Then we would stop in Texas to pick up our stuff, and head for the mountain states to begin the rest of our lives, and prepare for what was to come.” But love made Davis and Beason stay longer, and hence they did not leave on the Friday they “should” have left. “Fate” then played its card through a defective taillight and the rest was history.

What is at the bottom of this story? At its most basic level, it shows that certain NSA operatives were dabbling with alien-Christian eschatology – and went AWOL as a consequence. But is that all there is to it? We only have Davis’ word and his interpretation for it, but he does suggest that they may have been part of an experiment – as some observers noted at the time when their story hit the press.
First, early on, when Davis was on his way over to Ft. Meade, there was a woman on his bus who told him his name and said that “God showed me that you will help change the world.” It was a prophecy – at a time when Safire had not yet appeared on the scene and “confirm” his divine mission.
Davis also had an intriguing career. He noted that he had his initial posting in Ft. Meade, which was rare. “I had done work in psychic research back at Fort Meade, and was surprised at the seriousness with which our military approached this subject. I realized then that my fast-track to NSA was probably due to my Silva Mind Control background.” It suggests that Davis was followed – if not singled out – by the NSA early on.
Fast forward to their desertion. In the book, Davis states that “what we didn’t realize at the time was that the government had known of our plans and had an operative on the plane with us, just as Safire had told us. And they lost us when we arrived in Atlanta, just as she had assured us they would.” But the “best evidence” that they were indeed monitored is how the people at Anna’s house were arrested. Hueckstaedt swore that he did not tell the authorities where his fellow deserters were hiding out. Still, the authorities were able to quickly round them up. It suggests that someone knew where they were – and if that is indeed the case, Davis’ notion that the government knew that they were about to desert and followed them during their desertion, makes sense.

As bizarre as the story is, there is an even more bizarre twist, which seems to highlight that if all of this is true, it can’t possibly be true for all soldiers or NSA personnel. Davis claims that when he joined the NSA, he was “retrained in history”. He states: “What I learned was why history happened, who history was, why or when history was. The dates in the book are not all that accurate. Those are accepted dates not factual dates. To give an example. The founding of this country did not occur. The founding fathers were already meeting many years before the advent, the war against England, occurred. There was already a plan in place for the founding of new country. It was not just a spur because British soldiers shot someone or the stand-back. It was the series of events that happened over the period of 60 to 70 years. And they have been planning for the long time.” Such teachings seem bizarre, if only because they serve no real purpose for NSA personnel, except to provide this recruit with a conspiratorial outlook on history.
Where it goes off the wall is what Davis was talking about next. To cut a longish story short, he was claiming that there were “buildings” at White Sands which were “not ours”, suggesting they were not human – and very old. But he then jumps onto UFOs, stating that in the 1960s, a new word was introduced for them: AVC, or Alien Visitation Craft. And listen to this: “the human race was not created, born, linked to the apes, we are survivors of a great war. The human race as we see ourselves today, even our ancient relatives, were basically put on this planet and cut-off from the rest of the Universe.” And: “We have a special gene, that cannot be copied, cannot be manipulated. They have tried. We were told that is called the Jesus gene.” We can only wonder why an NSA operative is “required” to “know” this, in the unlikelihood that any of this would be true to begin with. There is no “need to know” and as such, should not be told. Worst, if true, we have a picture in which the NSA “educates” its new recruits that we are all alien descendents, and then allows them play with the Ouija board, only to have some of them go off half across the world, in the belief that the world is about to end. Though it seems that this fate befell Davis and co., it seems unlikely this is the fate of every NSA recruit. Hopefully.

“Logic” – which does not really come into this story, but somehow needs to be applied to keep a reasonable level of sanity, I would suggest – suggests that something else was going; that this group was singled out and became the victim of an experiment, which their pre-joining interests made them predisposed towards, and which “someone” carefully remoulded to see to test out a hypothesis. If this is true, then the scenario was successful, and when the test was concluded, they were rounded up, brought in… and allowed to tell their story, so that the public disclosure of their story would serve part of the exercise as well.