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 offence 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.