Ancient history

In another Zelig moment, Rico was camping in Northern California in about 1970 with his friends Kelley and Robert E. Smith when, while we were all clambering around on the cliffs north of the valley, a Sukhoi Su-19 (or so we later decided) came flying east off the ocean and boomed up the Usal valley, followed within a few minutes by several US Navy jets.
Now, there are only a couple of problems with this story.
First of all, what was any Russian plane doing flying into American airspace, how the hell did it get there (the Russians not being noted for their aircraft carriers), and what did all this portend? The fact that we didn't have radio reception in the valley, and didn't see a single car until we got nearly back to San Francisco down Route One, meant that we talked ourselves into believing that we'd seen the start of World War Three, and just hadn't heard any nukes going off...
We were never so pleased, nor surprised, to see the Golden Gate Bridge still standing, as we were that day.
Inquiries were made, receiving deafening silence, and only years later did Rico ever get any word ("Ah, so you saw that plane, huh?) through any of his contacts in the Navy.
It seems that the US had been gifted with a captured Russian plane by the Israelis, and it got trotted out occasionally in 'war games' like the one we'd (by accident) seen, in out-of-the-way places like where we'd (by accident) been, on the assumption that no one would ever see it.
To this day, it remains one of the top three weirdest things Rico's ever seen...