For most Americans, Huntsville never showed up on their radar screens; certainly, Alabama was not often thought of as a high-tech mecca. Then, right after this Christmas, a local inventor named David Keen said he had developed two superdestructive bullets, Black Rhino and Rhino-Ammo. According to Keen, the first could pierce bulletproof vests and the second would churn human flesh on contact, creating an irreparable wound. Police and other groups expressed outrage, and critics charged that Keen’s bullets were a hoax, failing in independent tests. He said last week that the bullets tested were only prototypes, and that he was still awaiting a federal response to his licensing application. “For people who think it’s a hoax,” he told Newsweek, “wait until someone gets hit with one.” Huntsville residents also condemned the bullets, which lacked the shimmer of its tall rockets aimed at godless enemies. “A lot of people here are really embarrassed by it,” said 37-year-old resident F. Charles Vaughn Jr., an assistant director of a local historic site. Now no one would care where the ICBMs and space-shuttle boosters were born, or where research for Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars was done. Huntsville was finally being recognized – but for the wrong thing.

Before the army brought Hitler’s V-2 rocket team to Huntsville in 1950, the place was little more than a dogwood-shaded cotton gin of 16,000 people. It did, however, have the Redstone Arsenal, a former World War II munitions plant that had reopened a year earlier as the nation’s center for research and development for military rockets. Huntsville’s space-age boom was ignited. By the early 1960s, its population approached 90,000, of which some 25,000 workers were directly tied to Redstone programs. In the same period housing starts leaped by 450 percent, retail sales by 274 percent and the number of passengers going through through the town’s airport by 1,950 percent. Huntsville was so key to America’s defense that during the cold war it earned itself a red star on the Soviet’s missile hit list. Huntsville remains a successful, ultra-high-tech center, filled with Ph.D.s who drive pickup trucks, Southern style. Its average household income in 1993 was $37,528, more than $10,000 higher than the state average. To keep it that way, the city has added virtual reality, DNA testing and computer-software manufacturing to its can-do know-how. And last month, a Russian An-124 transport plane delivered Soviet antiaircraft technology to Redstone for study. Huntsvillians speeding along I-565 took the behemoth plane lettered in Russian in full stride.

Then came Keen, who has an office in a plain two-story brick building downtown. He also claims to have several other facilities, but refused to say where they are. The 40-year-old research chemist, originally from Tennessee, is one of many who came to Huntsville to work in the defense industry, then spun off their own companies. But the other entrepreneurs haven’t caused as much controversy as the bullet maker. Mayor Steve Hettinger said he hoped the city wouldn’t get a rap for unleashing “bad technology.”

Many in Huntsville also fear that all the bullet talk might renew stereotypes about Alabamians being trigger-happy or thickheaded. Some still grumble at the mention of Forrest Gump, the dim fictitious Alabamian. “He was supposed to be from Mobile,” insisted Sara Cornelius, a supply analyst at Huntsville’s U.S. Army Missile Command. “We’re not some hick town where everybody is barefoot and pregnant.” Huntsvillians boast about low crime, clean streets and a citizenry of more than 100 nationalities. “We’ve become more of a cosmopolitan-type town,” says 76-year-old James R. Record, the town’s unofficial historian. But for all Huntsville’s modernity and recent notoriety, people here tend to hold on to past glories. A NASA shuttle and swept-winged attack jets stand at the aerospace museum, the town’s pride, as reminders of when Huntsville had a singular mission. Catherine Miller, 66, is a lifelong resident who assists the pastor in the First Baptist Church, the one with the missile spire. She mused: “We still talk of ourselves that way, Rocket City, U.S.A.”