Thank you for all of the replies!
First things first - Mike-Mat, regarding your comment about my experience: the phosphorus that makes a bullet a tracer acts exactly like a flare. It requires a spark of some sort (firing of the bullet & explosion of the powder) to ignite it, and then is self sustaining. Until that occurs, it is pyrotechnically safe and contact with air does nothing to initiate it. If this was not the case, trust me my experience would have told me to not mess with this. I have the tracer bullet my neighbor pulled and it was exposed to air until I reinstalled it yesterday (without incident)
I cannot explain what happened. You can see by the pics I've attached that something caused the tracer compound to ignite while the bullet was still seated. In looking at the recovered bullet this morning I see the bullet is still seated (did not dislodge as I previously thought it did) and burned as a result of something in the round detonating.
I am not trying to refute what you guys are saying about the functioning characteristics of the KBP or bullets for that matter - just providing a data point to draw some more information from regarding the discussion on what can, and cannot happen with these pullers with different ammo under normal conditions of use.
I appreciate the comments so far and hope to see a few more as I really want to pull the remaining 100ish rounds I have without fear of blowing myself up
Last thing - Dacaur - this thing was a slow burn and DID burn for around 40 +/- 5ish seconds. I had plenty of time to stand there and stare at it while my wife was panicking that the smoke detectors were going to go off.
Best regards!
Bob