Gulf Breeze Six

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For those not familiar with the term AWOL, it means absent without leave.

While there are many reasons a person will choose choose to join the military, if you're like me, you did it because you were fed up with working part-time jobs and had no direction in life.

That, and my good friend Zach roped me into it because he had also just signed up.

It's not like I didn't sort of know this when I signed the enlistment paperwork, but one of the more interesting reality checks after joining the military was finding out that I no longer had the freedom to travel whenever and wherever I wanted, especially when I was still a junior Marine.

Unless it was a weekend and even that wasn't guaranteed, you always had to tell someone where you were going, why you were going, and when you were going to be back.

A leave request is basically like submitting a request for time off at work, but if you don't do it in the military, you go to jail.

Family emergency?

Well, you just hope that your emergency leave request gets approved.

But you can't just leave.

And yet, some people do.

Why?

Lots of reasons.

Maybe there is something serious going on and they are emotionally overwrought, not thinking rationally.

One sailor we knew was apparently just tired of being in the military.

So when we ported in Guam, she just went to the airport, caught a flight, and went home.

But after some research,

it seems that some people have much more interesting reasons for going AWOL,

such as, I don't know, pull from a hat, killing the Antichrist.

Listen, I've read a lot of wild stories, but this one might just be the craziest.

It's got everything.

Ouija boards, demons, ghosts, mind control, UFOs, conspiracy to plot murder, wire fraud, heartbreak, explosions.

Okay, there's no explosions, but it's got everything else.

This is the true story.

of six U.S.

Army soldiers, intel specialists by the way, which I also was, who were tried and convicted of abandoning their post in West Germany to fly to Gulf Breeze, Florida.

Their reason?

Because a spirit they spoke to through a Ouija board had warned them about the coming apocalypse and had ordered them to find and kill the Antichrist.

The military officials who interrogated these men were left as dumbfounded as I am.

This is the story of the Gulf Breeze Six.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories.

The story of the Gulf Breeze Six begins with two young Army specialists, 26-year-old Kenneth Beeson and 25-year-old Vance Davis.

While these men had what others would call interesting beliefs, they were by all accounts well-trained and capable intelligence specialists in their field.

After completing their preliminary MOS training in the late 1980s, both men were assigned to the 731st Military Intelligence Brigade, stationed in Augsburg, West Germany.

While there, they were tasked with working at a major NSA listening post near the Soviet border.

It's no wonder they became fast friends.

Out of all their peers, these two young men shared a sincere fascination with all things paranormal.

An interest that, for both of them, stretched far back to the days of their adolescence.

For Kenneth Beeson, his unexplained experiences began when he was just five years old.

He woke up one night feeling thirsty, and as if on cue, He said that a ghost came forward, offering him a glass of water.

Kenneth would go on to spend his teenage and early adult years reading countless volumes of science fiction, comic books, and books about encounters with spirits and UFOs.

His fascination with the supernatural deepened with each passing year.

All of this did not go unnoticed by his family.

The more books Kenneth read, the more concerned they became.

Kenneth was undeniably bright, but he was also said to be woefully gullible.

His curious and welcoming attitude was something his family worried would make him susceptible to the influences of others.

After he enlisted in the Army, his family's fears were fully realized.

During Kenneth's intel training in Pensacola, Florida, he befriended and fell in love with a local woman named Anna Foster.

Anna was the owner of a New Age bookshop and referred to herself as a psychic and UFO enthusiast.

Her own unrestrained belief in the supernatural greatly encouraged Kenneth's ever-growing fascination with the subject.

And then there was Vance Davis.

As a teenager, along with the paranormal, he began to develop an interest in various methods of hypnosis.

At some point, he enrolled in the Silva Mind Control courses created by a man named Alex Merklinger, a spiritual guide who also held a reputation as a con man, stemming from his convictions and prison sentencing for wire and mail fraud.

Through these mind control courses, Vance told Kenneth that he had mastered the art of self-hypnosis through active imagination, a psychological technique that allows individuals to access their subconscious mind and explore their inner thoughts and emotions.

Eventually, Vance's practice of hypnotizing himself would take a very interesting turn.

During one of his self-imposed trances, Vance is said to have come face to face with a green-skinned alien being who identified herself as Kia.

And apparently, Kia had various powers.

As he communed with her during one session, Davis claimed that Kia, through some non-physical means, corrected his flat-footedness, something that had bothered him for years, especially after joining the army, when running in boots or standing for long periods in formation.

But it wasn't just healing sessions.

They spoke for hours.

Kia told Kenneth all about her species and about the wider universe.

Part of this included telling him about a protective alien group called the Alliance, which was at war with a more hostile coalition of beings known as the Others.

Bonded as friends by their shared interests and bizarre paranormal experiences, Kenneth and Vance spent much of their free time researching the subject of the strange and unexplained.

After spending their days intercepting and decrypting Soviet radio signals at the post in West Germany, following the evening formation, the two soldiers could often be found in their barracks, carrying on spirited conversations about their personal stories or discussing books and manuscripts that they had been reading.

But these more lighthearted activities soon progressed into sincere attempts to begin practicing what they were reading about.

Convinced of the existence of something on the other side, Kenneth and Vance wanted to make contact with whatever that was.

They attempted communication using a broad array of methods, ranging from guided meditations to the use of tarot cards.

While all of this took place privately, eventually a few other like-minded soldiers in their unit fell in with the group.

PFC Michael Huckstadt, age 19, PFC Chris Perlock, age 20, PFC William Sederberg, age 20, and even one of their NCOs, Sergeant Annette Ecleston, age 22.

As a group, the six young soldiers continued making attempts to contact spirits.

However, all of their initial methods repeatedly fell short of contacting anything.

All of that changed when they decided to pull out a Ouija board.

For the group, the board was a last resort.

They considered it rather juvenile, the board having a reputation in the late 1980s as a cheap party game.

But at this point, they were becoming somewhat desperate to validate their collective beliefs.

And it worked.

Any ounce of doubt that they had quickly vanished the moment the planchette started moving across the board.

Something was responding to their questions.

At first, what was being communicated through the board had no overtly religious meaning to it.

But during the course of seven or eight separate Ouija board sessions, this changed, as the six soldiers received messages from at least seven different spirits.

Most of these spirits identified themselves using names corresponding to biblical figures, prophets from the Old Testament like Zechariah, and the names of several of the disciples of Christ, including Mark and Timothy.

The group was shocked to eventually be contacted by a spirit claiming to be Mary herself, the mother of Jesus, who was reaching out specifically to the only female in the group, Sergeant Annette Eccleston.

The most domineering voice to come through the board, however, wasn't any of the spirits going by a biblical name.

It was a mysterious entity that identified itself only as Sapphire.

Well, we got introduced, basically, she said, and it was a woman, it felt very womanly, I guess, in the way it was moving, a person named Sapphire.

And we asked who it was, and she, you know, where she was from.

And she basically said she used to be a woman from

Georgia, believe it or not.

Yeah, so it was someone in the other realm,

which had me and both Ken and most of us really spook so-called to a dead person.

Over the course of the group's many consecutive Ouija board sessions, Sapphire relayed a terrifying warning to the six soldiers, a warning that the world was on the cusp of terrible, apocalyptic events.

As they continued to ask the spirit questions, The list of horrifying predictions grew longer and longer, totaling between 80 to 90 prophetic warnings.

One of the first predictions was that a major earthquake would occur in Iran, resulting in staggering casualties.

Over 300,000 people would be either injured or killed.

This would soon be followed by other significant geological disturbances, more devastating earthquakes in Russia and along the west coast of the United States.

This would lead to volcanic eruptions and catastrophic weather conditions impacting global geography and climate.

Sapphire's predictions also included social and political upheavals, forecasting wars in the Middle East involving the U.S., Iraq, and Israel.

Social unrest and economic collapse in the United States would lead to widespread riots and martial law.

Europe would undergo economic and political unification, leading to shifts in global power balances.

These events would set the stage for significant shifts in technology and religion, including the revealing of extraterrestrial life and the emergence of a new world order.

In the midst of this chaos and global transformation, the Antichrist would appear, a man who would bring about more devastating wars, major religious reform, persecution against all Christians, and immense human suffering.

Despite their prodding, the six soldiers were unable to obtain a specific identity for this person, Sapphire only telling them that he would emerge out of the smoldering ruins of Europe in the year 1998, the year being significant because mathematically it was three times the biblical number 666.

Proclaiming himself to be the Messiah, Sapphire went on to say, this person would be hailed as a peacemaker by the masses, including all major religious leaders.

In reality, he was of course a wolf in sheep's clothing.

But what was the point in them knowing all of this?

If the world was about to end, as the Ouija board was telling them, what could six low-ranking U.S.

Army soldiers do about it?

According to Sapphire's messages, these six young soldiers did have a part to play.

Their psychic connection was no accident.

Sapphire told them that they had been chosen by God himself to embark on an urgent and important mission, to prepare for the coming apocalypse and be among the chosen few survivors tasked with guiding humanity towards the light of God.

in its aftermath.

While the soldiers were fairly convinced that they were in direct contact with a divine being, they were initially unsure of what to make of these incredible predictions about the future.

That is, until one of the prophecies spelled out on the Ouija board came true.

A powerful earthquake hit Iran early this morning, killing at least 25,000 people, according to the Iranian government, and injuring thousands more.

The quake was centered about 200 miles outside Tehran in a remote mountainous farming region.

It measured 7.3 on the Richter scale.

Many towns were leveled.

Iranian radio said rescue workers had not been able to reach some of the hardest-hit villages because the roads are blocked by landslides.

The quake was felt in Tehran, but no damage was reported there.

The U.S.

has offered to send humanitarian aid.

It has not yet received a request from Iran.

On June 21, 1990, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck in the Caspian Sea region of northern Iran, devastating an area of 20,000 square kilometers or 7,700 square miles.

A number of cities and towns, largely composed of unreinforced masonry buildings, were reduced to rubble.

Considered one of the world's most devastating earthquakes, it resulted in some 40,000 to 50,000 deaths, another 60,000 more injured, and at least 400,000 people displaced from their homes.

While news of the major disaster was broadcast to the world, it's unlikely many people gave it much thought.

It was just another bad earthquake.

But for the six soldiers stationed in Germany, This seemed to be a chilling wake-up call.

Outside of the difference in the number of casualties, they were at a complete loss to understand how SAPHIRE was somehow able to predict this event over a month before it happened, including its geographic location.

Having been initially skeptical about all the prophetic messages, this event was apparently all the confirmation they needed to know that the end times were upon them and that God had truly called them into service.

The immediate problem was that they were all active duty in the army.

It's not as if they could simply explain their God-given mission to their chain of command and expect to be dismissed from the NSA listening post in West Germany.

They needed more guidance.

Once again, they turned to the Ouija board, the hand of Sapphire coming through to move the planchette and give them clear instructions on how to proceed.

According to Sapphire, The best course of action was for the soldiers to abandon the military, regardless of the consequences, then quickly make their way back to the U.S.

From there, the group would retreat into the mountainous regions of the country in order to continue their spiritual development and preparations for the coming disasters.

After hearing this, the six soldiers found themselves at a bizarre and tense crossroads.

What was more important?

The oath that they had sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution in defense of their nation, or to protect the entire world in service to God.

The choice, it seemed, had already been made for them.

Hey, it's Luke, the host of Wartime Stories.

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Over the course of the next month, if any of their Army peers or commanders were paying any attention, they might have been concerned about the new and strange behaviors of the six soldiers in their unit.

Members of the Ouija board group had quietly started selling off personal belongings in an attempt to raise money for their life on the run.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Beeson reached out to Anna Foster back in Florida, telling her of their plans and how they would need a safe house to lay low in.

It was likely the military would quickly investigate the disappearance of six soldiers from an NSA listening post and start looking for them.

Without any hesitation, Anna told Kenneth that he and his gang of runaways were welcome to hide out in her home in Gulf Breeze, a small town not too far outside of Pensacola, where all of the soldiers had been stationed during their intelligence training.

With that, the final piece of the soldiers' plan to abandon their post in Germany fell into place.

They had a destination.

On July 9th, 1990, using both official and falsified off-base Liberty passes, The soldiers casually walked off of the Augsburg listening post.

But rather than remaining in the local area as their leave passes required, they headed to the train station.

As they boarded the first train heading for the city of Munich, despite his otherwise unflinching belief in the importance of their God-given mission, Kenneth Beeson felt terrified.

While the United States wasn't technically at war with the Soviets, the two nuclear rivals were still locked in a tense standoff that threatened to boil over at a moment's notice.

His and the other soldiers' collective duties in manning the Augsburg listening post were vital to the West's efforts to intercept and decrypt Soviet radio transmissions, breaking their radio codes, hoping to catch early indications of any offensive nuclear actions.

The sheer weight of six soldiers with top secret security clearances abandoning their posts at such a critical time meant the consequences of their actions could be severe.

At best, a court-martial followed by a long prison sentence.

At worst,

well, Kenneth tried to put the thought out of his mind.

Finding their seats on the train, Kenneth's stomach turning over at the thought of what would happen if they were ever caught, he reminded himself that there was something far worse looming on the horizon:

the end of the world.

Hoping to throw off anyone tracking their movements, they chose not to fly directly to Pensacola, Florida, but to Knoxville, Tennessee.

Arriving back in the States, a friend of Kenneth Beeson's picked them up at the McGee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville.

But they needed to get their own wheels, so the group pooled their cash to purchase a vehicle, a rundown 1970s Volkswagen van.

Piling inside, they then immediately drove the 400 miles south to Florida.

Having spent almost a full day traveling after leaving their post in Germany, by the time the group had landed in Tennessee, their failure to return to base had not gone unnoticed.

With their command being unsure of their whereabouts, their official status was considered absent unknown, but if the following investigation determined their absence was voluntary, it would be updated to absent without leave or AWOL.

Considering the sensitive nature of their classified intelligence work, the Army quickly spread the names and faces of the six soldiers far and wide, anxious to find them.

The initial underlying presumption was that the young soldiers had potentially been taken by a foreign group.

Whether their disappearance was involuntary or not, and certainly if they had willingly defected to the Soviets or some other group, the U.S.

military could be looking at a major security breach.

In short, the sudden disappearance of six intelligence personnel raised all kinds of hell.

As American and European authorities authorities began searching high and low for them in Germany, Kenneth Beeson and the five other runaways were crossing the Pensacola Bridge, entering the city of Gulf Breeze, Florida.

Their first stop would be Anna Foster's home.

They would spend a few days lying low, gathering supplies, and preparing to drive their van back north to the Appalachian Mountains, where, according to Sapphire's instructions, they would await the coming apocalypse.

And here is where their story collides with a very odd coincidence.

Tonight on hard copy, there's been a new wave of strange activity in the skies over Gulf Freeze, Florida, and we've got the latest pictures.

Doug Bruckner shows us what's going on in the town they call UFO USA.

Here it is.

Here's our videotapes.

Look at it.

You tell us.

We don't know, but it's there.

And what appears on those videotapes is a mystery.

UFOs hovering as plain as day, spherical, shiny objects seeming to defy gravity, and then in the blink of an eye, they're gone.

But they keep coming back to Gulf Breeze, Florida.

It's an affluent community nestled in the Florida panhandle.

Some say the UFOs are attracted to the crystal white sand.

Others say it's the sparkling clear waters.

Whatever it is, the UFOs are coming in droves.

Why the UFO is coming here, why we witness it so much, I don't know the answers to the why.

Ed Walters makes his living as a housing contractor, but seven years ago, his life was changed forever when he looked to the sky and saw his first UFO.

I deal with concrete and steel.

And UFOs are just something I was never interested in

until I saw one myself.

And here are those photographs Ed took in 1987.

Whether they knew it at the time or not, the six soldiers' arrival into Gulf Breeze, Florida on a glorified mission to destroy the Antichrist could not have come at a stranger time.

While Gulf Breeze had long been nothing more than a quiet little beach community, In the late 1980s, the town finally became famous.

Beginning in 1987 and over the following two years, the small panhandle community played host to hundreds of sightings of supposed extraterrestrial craft and other flying objects.

The Gulf Breeze sightings, as they came to be known, became some of the best-known UFO sightings in history.

They were referenced on the X-Files, studied by the History Channel and other cable programs, and have since been repeatedly dissected and argued on various online forums.

The UFO sightings started when a local local contractor named Ed Walters began producing photos of UFOs that he claimed to have taken in his front yard on the evening of Veterans Day, November 11, 1987.

Using a Polaroid camera, Walters would snap numerous pictures of these UFOs.

While many skeptics argued the photos were clearly a hoax, Walters was not the only eyewitness.

Apparently, there were multiple witnesses who drew what they saw before his story was even published.

And in the following UFO Mania, Walters would later capture even more footage of other UFOs using his video camera.

Ed scanned the horizon, hoping to capture one of those flashes in his camera.

But instead, he saw the source of the mysterious Scrobes, a UFO hovering silently above the beach.

There she is right there.

Oh my God.

I kind of felt a little insecure being out on the beach all by myself.

And then the UFO disappeared into thin air.

When you know it, it interacts with the boat, with the person walking.

These are the kind of things that you look for in a video.

Bland Pugh is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network.

He's spent years investigating thousands of sightings over Gulf Breeze, and he says that Ed Walters' footage remains completely unexplainable.

Unless Ed Walters had a brother-in-law named

Spielberg,

it'd be pretty hard to do tapes like that.

UFO researchers have investigated the photos for tampering, as well as compared them with descriptions and drawings provided by other witnesses in the area.

Despite the opposition, those who support Walter's claims have, to some people's satisfaction, provided at least enough evidence to believe that something strange did happen.

In short, some have said that while they may not believe all of it, Walters is a far more interesting story than most people give it credit for.

In any case, following the publication of his photos, more reports of UFO sightings started pouring in.

Even a few local Gulf Breeze politicians said they saw them.

Hoping to see one for themselves, thousands more people from out of state started flooding in, gathering with many locals at places like Shoreline Park in Gulf Breeze and other nearby areas at night to watch the skies.

But here's the thing about this small panhandle section of Florida.

It is packed with military bases, Pensacola Naval Air Station, Hurlbert Field, and Eglin Air Force Base.

As such, the UFO sightings caused quite the stir.

And now, right as the sightings had started to die down, the small town of Gulf Breeze would soon be recognized in national papers all over again.

And the UFO craze of the previous two years would take on a whole new chapter when it was combined with a shocking story involving six AWOL soldiers and a biblical apocalypse.

After arriving at Anna Foster's home in Gulf Breeze, the group decided it would be best to split up.

Five of them would remain at the house while Sergeant Annette Ecleston established an emergency campsite nearby as a fallback in case their safe house was somehow compromised.

Initially, the group didn't plan to stay in Gulf Breeze for long, maybe just a few days, to give the ongoing investigation by the military time to settle down.

And during that time, they kept in communication with the Spirit Sapphire using the Ouija board.

Sapphire 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.

However, something unexpected happened that changed their plans.

Something that Sapphire failed to warn them about.

Anna Foster lived with a roommate by the name of Diana.

And when Vance Davis met Diana, he almost immediately fell head over heels in love with her.

According to Davis's later writings, he had had visions of Diana, his soulmate, dating back to his teenage years.

As soon as he laid eyes on her, he just knew she was the one his prophetic dreams had been telling him about.

And as it turned out, Diana was equally smitten with him.

So, Kenneth and Vance were now feeling at home, eager to spend some quality time with their girlfriends.

But over the next few days, the other members of the group were not feeling so comfortable.

They were instead growing increasingly restless.

After all, the military was actively searching for them.

And coming back to Pensacola, an area dotted with military bases, and the city where they had completed their intelligence training, it might not have been the wisest decision.

After several days of prolonged boredom, the youngest member of the group, PFC Michael Huckstadt, decided to throw caution to the wind.

He borrowed their rickety van and went into town, hoping to blow off some steam at a local nightclub.

His going out might not have been an issue, were it not for one minor detail: the van had a busted taillight.

On the night of July 14, 1990, four days after their group had snuck out of Germany, PFC Michael Huckstadt, driving alone in their van at the time, was pulled over by a Gulf Breeze police officer.

Michael had every reason to be terrified as he watched the officer exit his vehicle and approach the driver's side window of the van.

He had a hard time concealing it.

The officer then then couldn't help notice how tense this young man behind the wheel was as he questioned him, asking for his ID and proof of insurance.

Michael had neither.

The officer then asked for his name.

Perhaps too nervous to think up a lie, Michael gave him his real name.

The officer then returned back to his vehicle and promptly ran a computer check on his identity.

Sure enough, Michael Huckstatt's name was flagged in the system.

The Department of Defense had been looking for him, as he was wanted for desertion.

The officer returned to the van, politely asking Michael to step out of the vehicle.

Michael knew he'd been caught and begged the officer to look the other way and just let him go.

The officer did not.

After he was arrested, Michael was quickly turned over to local military authorities.

After calling the security police at Pensacola Naval Air Station to come pick him up, the Gulf Breeze police were informed that Michael was traveling with five other soldiers, also wanted for being absent without leave.

A search of the van provided them enough information to lead the police back to the home of Anna Foster and the group's emergency campsite.

The other five were rounded up, and all six of them were shipped north to Fort Benning, Georgia, where they were then placed in solitary confinement and interrogated.

They were later moved to Fort Knox, Kentucky.

All of them were terrified.

Their fate, a possible execution sentence for desertion, hung in the balance.

In spite of all their weeks of careful planning and spiritual guidance, In only a matter of hours, the soldiers' divine mission had completely fallen apart, coming to a very anticlimactic end.

The military investigation that followed was extensive, with each member of the six being kept isolated and relentlessly questioned to expose any underlying motives of espionage or treason.

They were interrogated by the Army, the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, who was in charge of their listening post in Germany.

The truth, as investigators were soon to discover, was far stranger than anything they could have anticipated.

Knowing the severity of their situation, family members of the six soldiers immediately went to the press in what appears to be their hope to stop the army from sentencing them to death.

Once the press got involved, the whole story started to take on a life of its own.

A media frenzy ensued, but the story needed a name, and that's when journalists dubbed the group the Gulf Breeze Six.

On July 20th, 1990, the Northwest Florida Daily News ran the following headline, Six 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.

Their bizarre story drew national interest.

with more sensational headlines about their mission from God being spread across every broadcast and newspaper stand in the country.

As As the military was being very tight-lipped on the matter, journalists looking to get the scoop resorted to contacting friends, family, and other associates of the six soldiers.

The subsequently wild assertions and statements made by some of these individuals about the group and their motives only added to the frenzy.

For example, a Bybee, Tennessee man who sold the 1970s Volkswagen to the Gulf Breeze told reporters that the soldiers intended to go to Gulf Breeze because they thought

Jesus Christ would make his second coming aboard one of the many UFOs seen in the area.

It was supposed to be rapture time, said his wife Vivian.

Another unknown person, possibly a fellow soldier, told the press, The six believed the end of the world was near and that Jesus Christ was going to arrive on a Pensacola beach on a UFO to take believers up to heaven.

In his defense, Vance Davis was reported to have scoffed at these claims.

With their strange mission and arrival in Gulf Breeze coming only a short time after a string of hundreds of UFO reports in the area, the media and public were quick to gravitate towards the conclusion that the two supernatural events were somehow connected.

Many believed the group had come to Gulf Breeze because of the UFOs, as opposed to their stated motive of simply needing a place to lie low, which was Anna Foster's home.

It didn't help at all to quell these leading connections when Kenneth Beeson was later found to have stated that he believed in reincarnation and that he had been sacrificed to the gods in a previous life.

and that he also believed that the U.S.

government was in cahoots with aliens and that evidence for this could actually be found in Augsburg, the NSA listening site in Germany where they worked.

He truly believed 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 people like him.

Kenneth said that 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.

The spirit they spoke to through the Ouija board, Sapphire, confirmed to the group that the U.S.

government was working with the aliens, as he and his friends had suspected all along.

For his part, Vance Davis was sincere in showing investigators documented proof that their defection and travel to Gulf Breeze was the result of the eight Ouija board sessions.

He explained how Sapphire, the spirit they had contacted, had warned them of a coming war.

When some of Sapphire's prophecies, both minor and significant, started to come true, one stating the exact dynamics and the number of casualties of a major earthquake in Iran, It convinced the six of them that they were dealing with genuine supernatural encounters.

When they deserted, Vance told the investigators, each soldier 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.

Vance assured them their decision to hide in Gulf Breeze was simply because they knew the area and Anna Foster lived there.

It had nothing to do with UFOs.

Anna Foster was of course questioned by police, but was not arrested or charged.

Police told the press that she was only involved because she knew one of the men.

She was advised not to make any comments during the ongoing investigation.

During an interview with reporters, Anna was quoted as saying,

I don't know what to do.

I know it's all real crazy right now.

I feel

very caught up in this.

I was just being a nice person when I opened my house to a friend and his friends.

I don't know.

When he was interviewed by the press, Stan Johnson, a friend of Kenneth Beeson, spoke at length about their time as friends.

Being a resident of Kenneth's home state of Tennessee, Stan had been the one to pick the six soldiers up at the airport in Knoxville, and his testimony seemed to contradict the group's statements about having no interest in UFOs.

He was a very nice fellow, but very gullible.

He was one of these people who

believed anything someone would tell him.

The idea that he was arrested or that he was hanging around with a cult-like group didn't surprise me.

He kind of lives in a science fiction fantasy world

sometimes.

He used to hang around my photography business.

Never talked much about what he did in the Army, but he did always talk about science fiction, UFOs, that kind of thing.

He loved UFOs.

A couple of years ago, before he went back into the Army, there was a book floating around the area predicting the end of the world.

He really believed that.

He called me several weeks before I picked him up.

He said he needed a ride from the airport

and

wanted me to find a vehicle for him to buy after he landed.

Said he needed a van,

station wagon, or a big car that several people could fit in.

And I was under the impression they were on leave and they were going to Pensacola to meet some friends.

He did mention about going to Pensacola for a UFO convention.

Stan's comments were published in a Florida paper under the headline, Six Soldiers Here to Kill Antichrist.

Whether these headlines were intended to be serious or just shocking enough to sell papers, In and amongst the flurry of bizarre and often conflicting testimony, there was at least one claim that gave investigators cause for a legitimate concern.

According to a renowned UFologist, Jacques Valet, during the investigation, a rather insidious rumor was gathering headway in the local UFO community, one that depicted the Gulf Breeze 6's mission with a much darker intent.

In a letter received from Georgia State MUFON, the state's mutual UFO network, The organization's director, Larry Hebbrand, had conveyed some alarming information.

Larry was a personal contact of Jacques Vallet.

Evidently, during the course of the investigation, Larry had been contacted by an anonymous source who worked at Fort Benning in Georgia.

In the letter that Larry received, this person claimed to have conducted examinations on the six soldiers.

The anonymous contact stated that during their interviews, At least two of the soldiers, their names withheld, stated that one of their reasons for being in Gulf Breeze was to find Ed Walters, the man who had kicked off the UFO craze two and a half years earlier with his UFO photos.

According to this letter, the Gulf Breeze Six believed that Ed Walters was in fact the Antichrist that the spirits had been warning them about, and that he was the one responsible for bringing the UFOs to the skies over Gulf Breeze.

The letter asserted that the group's intention was, in no uncertain terms, to murder Ed Walters.

When confronted with these claims, however, the soldiers denied the allegations as ludicrous.

While they did believe that an Antichrist would surface, such an event wasn't going to occur for another eight years, according to the Spirit Sapphire's prophetic statements.

The Army's investigation ultimately failed to surface any real evidence suggesting a plot to commit murder.

The conspicuous letter sent to Larry Hebbrand from his his anonymous Fort Benning contact was ultimately considered completely unfounded.

Much to the surprise of everyone following the story, by the end of the month of July 1990, the military investigation into the Gulf Breeze 6 came to a sudden and abrupt close.

One article published on July 28th read, Washington, six U.S.

soldiers who left their military intelligence post in West Germany and told friends they were going to rendezvous with Jesus Christ and UFOs have been discharged from the Army.

They have been released from their military obligation and they are civilians again, an Army spokesman, Major Joseph Allred, said Friday.

But that's just the thing.

After finding no evidence of espionage, the six soldiers were quickly offered a non-judicial punishment under the charges of desertion.

The military quickly ended the investigation, the six were reduced to the lowest rank and forfeited half a month's pay, and then they were released from military service with what is widely reported as honorable discharges.

It didn't help alleviate the strangeness of the whole thing when, despite the vast amounts of media coverage devoted to the Gulf Bree six in the aftermath of their arrest, Even after the investigation came to a close, the Army continued to offer no comments or information on the case.

A Pentagon spokesman evidently 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.

And even when the case was eventually declassified, 1,400 pages of the military's 1,600-page report were redacted, kept from public view.

People who took interest in the story began to wonder if the military actually had something to hide, or if they were just too embarrassed to openly admit that something this outlandish happened within the ranks of their own servicemen.

Likewise, most members of the Gulf Breeze and their known affiliates have refused to speak with the media about the ordeal, leaving newspapers and tabloid journalists to fill in the blanks.

In the years that have followed, numerous theories surrounding the case continue to circulate in in media and online forums, with some even speculating that the soldiers were the unwitting subjects of military psychic experimentation.

Although we only have Davis' word for it, along with many other fascinating claims, when he later published his writings, he does suggest that they may have been part of an experiment, as even some observers noted at the time when their story hit the press.

Something that only adds to the mystery is that a few days before their release from confinement at Fort Knox, an anonymous letter was sent to several major news outlets and the U.S.

Army, which read the following.

ABC, NBC, CBS, AP, UPI.

U.S.

Army.

Free the Gulf Breeze 6.

We have the missing plans, the box of 500-plus photos, and the plans you want back.

Here is proof with close-ups cut out.

Next, we send the close-ups and then everything unless they are are released.

Theorists have often pointed to this as proof that the Gulf Breeze had in fact tapped into something legitimate with their psychic dabbling, possibly even obtaining classified government knowledge on UFOs or psychic research.

But again, now over 30 years later, the story is fraught with contradictions, wild assertions, and otherwise a difficult-to-follow path of information from various sources.

What is known is that the fallout from the ordeal weighed heavily on the members of Gulf Breeze VI.

Whatever led them to abandon their post, whether spirits or not, their military careers, their professional reputations, and personal relationships were irreparably damaged.

While not much is known about what became of most of them, Vance Davis remained quite vocal about his experience and beliefs, publishing a book in 1995 detailing the events of the Gulf Breeze VI, which is titled, Unbroken Promises, A True Story of Courage and Belief.

The book by Davis includes various predictions, including the earthquakes and political events that Sapphire told him about.

Davis even claimed to have predicted the Gulf War, but was later questioned about the specificity and timing of this prediction.

Many of Davis' predictions were criticized for being vague or easily derived from current events at the time.

Davis appeared on the Coast-to-Coast AM radio program with Art Bell in 1994 and 1998 to share his story.

His final interview does seem to be one of his last public appearances.

It has been suggested that perhaps as Sapphire's predictions of the coming apocalypse failed to materialize in the next three years, by 1998, Vance Davis also chose to distance himself from the public eye.

Whatever you think about it, the Gulf Breeze Sixes story is certainly one of the most bizarre cases of desertion to come out of the U.S.

military.

Its outlandish nature continues to baffle and enthrall supernatural researchers well into the 21st century.

And, as demonstrated by the Marine Corps Engineer School on Camp Lejeune, who banned the use of them outright in 2013,

It wouldn't be the last time American servicemen would attempt to use Ouija boards to speak with something on the other side, which then resulted in bad things happening.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Acasio, and Whitlacascio.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and and Jordan Stidham.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Klogston Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.