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173 SPECIAL EFFECTS In the following days four of the other five soldiers were picked up at the home of a local psychic named Anna Foster, who worked at a Gulf Breeze New Age bookstore. She had attended the recent MUFON convention, held in nearby Pensacola and devoted almost entirely to the Gulf Breeze case. According to veteran ufologist James Moseley, who lives in Key West, this woman may have been the source of the soldiers’ interest in the conspiracy-oriented material disseminated by Bill Cooper. His latest report described a government cover-up of alien visits to earth, and it discussed essentially the same extraordinary themes that Cooper himself had enumerated to me when we had dined together aboard the Queen Mary. The sixth soldier, a Connecticut woman named Annette F. Eccles- ton, was found camping by herself on a local beach. There was more, as a few newspapers would soon report. (See, for instance, the San Jose Mercury of July 19, 1990, the Seattle Times of the same day, or the Oakland Tribune of August 12, which quoted the Los Angeles Times. By mid-August, however, press coverage of the events mysteriously stopped.) The six soldiers were quickly moved back behind the fence at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they were interrogated by Army Intelligence, CIA, and NSA. They had left their posts, it now appeared, in the burning belief that Armageddon was imminent, that the rapture prophesied by weird Christian fundamentalist sects was just around the corner, and that they had been designated to greet alien spaceships marking the return of Jesus Christ. A note to that effect was reportedly found in their quarters in Germany, together with biblical references and mention of a cult called the End of the World. The group's leader appears to have been Kenneth G. Beason, twenty-six, of Middlesboro, Kentucky. One of his civilian friends, Stan Johnson, a photographer who lives in Bylee, Tennessee, told newspaper reporters that a few years before, Beason had asked him to take pictures of spaceship models. On July 7, 1990, Johnson picked up Beason and another soldier—Michael J. Hueckstaedt, nineteen, of Farson, Wyoming—at the Knoxville air- port. He helped them buy the used 1971 Volkswagen van in which they were eventually arrested. They used it to drive first to Chattanooga,