On a Friday night in July 1990, in Gulf Breeze, Florida, patrol officer Don Stevens spotted a van traveling with 40 taillights.

Stevens stopped the van and asked the driver for ID.

When the driver failed to furnish any ID, Stevens ran a computer check,

which revealed something rather unusual.

The man driving the van was a soldier who'd gone AWOL,

and it would turn out that he wasn't the only AWOL soldier.

There were six of them, and the local law enforcement quickly rounded them up from a nearby home and a campground.

The New York Times reported they had gone AWOL from the Army Intelligence Unit at the sensitive national security agency eavesdropping post in West Germany.

The soldiers had with them several duffel bags, suitcases and briefcases.

And so begins a very strange tale.

Investigators had been told that the six belonged to, a group called the end of the world.

Military authorities had issued a worldwide alert for the missing men on July 9th.

The Pentagon said that two of the soldiers went on unauthorised leave from their unit,

the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade

at Augsburg, West Germany, about two weeks ago, and never returned. At the same time,

two other soldiers from the unit vanished, and officials suspected that two more who were on leave would not return, said the newspaper.

Two of the soldiers had trained at the Florida Pensacola Naval Air Station and Corey Station, a naval

electronic warfare training centre, both close to the beach town of Gulf Breeze.

The newspaper said, police departments said that when the police burst into the apartment early Saturday morning, the soldiers had at least £4,000 in cash, where the group were

taken into custody and handed over to the military authorities.

The following day, they were flown to Fort Benning in Georgia, where they were held in solitary

confinement.

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