The torn wing of the F117A Nighthawk Stealth fighter lay on a bed of burnt corn-shocks in a muddy field at the edge of the village, a few metres from a broken wooden wagon. Its dull black surface was criss-crossed with what looked like bullet holes, as if it had been machine-gunned from above, but the bulb encased in the clear plastic wing light was unscathed.
Serb news reports about the downing of more than a dozen NATO aircraft since the war started on March 24th owed more to fantasy than fact, but here at last was proof of one.
The $45 million marvel had left Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico with the 4450th tactical group of the 49th fighter wing last October, during an initial flare-up of the Kosovo crisis. It took off from Aviano base in northern Italy not long before it was shot down by the Yugoslav air force.
The proud, white stencilled emblem of a five-pointed star flanked by two stripes on either side was unscratched, but the ragged edges of the wing were a lasagne of the black linoleum-like outer coating, fibreglass fabric, a tiny honeycomb of wires on wood, and yellow styrofoam.
It was just after 10 p.m. on Saturday night when the 2,000 villagers of Budjanovci, 40 km north-west of Belgrade, heard the plane above them. "We saw two lights in the clouds," a local soldier said. His belted khaki green uniform and pointed cap were the same as those worn by Tito's partisans in the second World War.
His account implied that a Yugoslav MiG - not anti-aircraft artillery - downed the most advanced aircraft in NATO's arsenal. "There was a big explosion. The fuel exploded. It fell to the ground and it burned until morning," he added.
Yesterday Budjanovci was the most famous place in Yugoslavia. Twenty-first century technology had crashed into a time warp, a village of 600 ancient, crumbling houses in the Serb province of Vojvodina, near the Bosnian border. Here, peasant women wear headscarves, thick woolly socks and clogs. Prized pigeons nest in rooftops and the locals make Sljivovica brandy from the pink-blooming plum trees in their gardens.
The men piled on the back of tractor-pulled wagons to visit the black fuselage of the aircraft, protruding from a clump of bushes hundreds of metres across the fallow corn fields. The journalists were not to allowed to. "NATO will come back and bomb this place, to destroy the evidence," was the military press officer's feeble explanation.
Milica Lalosevic (65) was in her cottage less than half a kilometre from the crash site, beyond a red-roofed, two-storey house and a yard filled with chickens.
"Every night we are waiting for the bombing," she said. "When we see and hear the doors slamming and the walls moving, we get dressed." When she heard the racket in the sky above, Mrs Lalosevic wanted to run outside to watch, but her husband, Gavra, stopped her. It sounded like a plane turning around above them, she said. "When we went outside, the plane was on fire. The whole of Europe was lit up by the fire. If a needle was on the grass, you would have found it."
By coincidence, Yugoslavia's first triumph in the six-day-old war occurred on the eve of Serb National Day, the 10th anniversary of President Slobodan Milosevic's annulment of the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina provinces. The F-117A wing quickly became a modern relic, ripped asunder, its pieces to be squirrelled away like treasure in the cupboards of local homes. Men sawed at the wing with knives, filling rucksacks with pieces of cake-like yellow styrofoam.
A farmer with a weathered face, missing teeth and dirt-stained fingers pulled a piece of the plane's black coating from his pocket. "I know mechanics and it is very simply made," he boasted. "The US military makes a lot of propaganda about how expensive it is, but it is only because of this material that the plane is invisible."
The disappearance of the pilot also seemed a high-technology miracle bordering on the mystical. None of the villagers or local soldiers saw him bale out, though one man claimed he'd found the pilot's equipment 4 km away. NATO announced the pilot was "in good shape" and "giving a full account" of what happened.
Equipped with a geo-strategic satellite positioner, he had, it was assumed, called in rescuers from nearby Bosnia.
BUT the Serbs were sceptical. It was hard to imagine where a pilot could hide in the vast, bog-like plain of freshly ploughed corn fields. "I hope the poor bastard does not get found by peasants," a Yugoslav official said, alluding to the second World War, when enemy pilots whose parachutes were caught in trees were hacked to death by peasants.
It was one of history's reversals that Serbs once hid US pilots shot down by the Nazis. Until very recently, the ageing US fliers and their erstwhile Serb saviours belonged to an association that organised visits between the US and Yugoslavia.
Serbia's friendship for the US may never recover. Since Yugoslavia broke off diplomatic relations with the US, France and Britain last week, someone has painted swastikas on the door of the US embassy in Kneza Milosa Street, and the wall outside the French embassy says: "US Servants - French Murderers."
In Budjanovci, a sturdy peasant woman with angry eyes told me she would never speak to foreigners again. "We will die here because of the Americans and English. They should be killing Albanians in Kosovo, not us."
Serb forces, it seems, were attending to that. Throughout the weekend, refugees from Kosovo province arrived in Macedonia and Albania with terrifying stories of massacres and burning villages.
Among the victims was an Albanian human rights lawyer, Mr Bajram Kelemendi, who was shot dead in the street in Pristina, along with his two sons.
It was as if NATO attacks on Serb forces in Kosovo provided a form of air cover for ethnic cleansing. Half-a-million ethnic Albanians - more than a quarter of the population - have now been displaced, NATO announced yesterday. The end result of this war could be the fulfilment of the Serbs' fondest wishes: the mass expulsion of close to two million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo to neighbouring countries.
The federal Information Minister, Mr Milan Komnenic, provided the only commentary on the slaughter in Kosovo. After asserting in a press conference on Saturday that Belgrade "has become a symbol of resistance to barbarism", he accused NATO of mounting "an unthinkable aggression" against "a sovereign country which never attacked anyone, which was dealing with an internal matter".
He called Mr Hashim Thaci, a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army and a signatory of the Rambouillet peace accord, "America's favourite terrorist", and said Mr Thaci had called upon Kosovo Albanians "to leave their houses on fire to create a pretext for massive NATO air raids on Serbia and Montenegro".
So after accusing the Albanians of rigging a massacre at Racak in January, Yugoslavia is now accusing them of destroying their own villages.
The shooting down of the F-117A fighter provided a temporary morale boost for the Serbs. Egged on by the presence of television cameras, they jumped on the aircraft wing waving Yugoslav flags.
Back in Belgrade, thousands attended an open-air pop concert marking Serb national day. They burned US flags and chanted obscene slogans about US mothers to the tune of Serb football songs.
In the first days of the war, air raid sirens sounded before the bombers reached Belgrade. But several times at the weekend, the howling sirens were heard after loud explosions, indicating that the early-warning system which officials had vaunted has been damaged.
Residents of the capital seemed especially frightened on Saturday, after Friday night's bombing of the Avala munitions dump. During a late-afternoon alert, fellow-passengers in my taxi urged the driver to run red lights and speed past the defence ministry and telecommunications buildings because they feared they might be targets.
Stranded pedestrians huddled in the entrances of buildings. Wolf-like dogs tore rubbish bags from a trash skip in one of the city's finest boulevards. But amid the noise and panic, the tall, handsome young couple walking nonchalantly down Balkan Street were an apparition.
Belgrade Serbs claim they do not understand why NATO is punishing them, although some theorise that the US wants the precious minerals of Kosovo's Trebca mines. They exclude the possibility that the West would wage war for moral, humanitarian reasons.
"What about the Kurds?" a Serb friend asked over lunch in a deserted fish restaurant on the river. "There are 25 million Kurds, and less than two million Kosovo Albanians, so why don't they give the Kurds a country?"
Two hundred thousand Bosnians were killed before the US finally stopped that war in 1995; two thousand people, mostly Albanians, have been killed in Kosovo.
Somewhere in the back of their stubborn minds, the Serbs suspect that by going to war for Kosovo, the West is trying to redeem the honour it lost in the Cambodian, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides.