Rico's history for the day

Rico says that, back in about 1970, he, his then-girlfriend Ruth, and his friends Kelley and Robert E. Smith were visiting Usal, a (then) little-visited valley in Northern California. We were all out clambering up the steep cliff on the northern side of the valley's mouth (photo, top left) when, to our surprise, a plane came thundering off the ocean and up the valley.
To our great surprise, it was this, so low down that Robert and Rico, who were hardly a hundred feet off the ocean ourselves, saw it from the side:

Yup, that's a MiG-25, a Russian fighter plane, in full Frontal Aviation camouflage.
Kelley, being lower down on the cliff, saw this (except with bombs hanging off it):

Worse yet, a minute or two later, three of these (a single and then a pair) thunder up the valley:

Remember, please, that this is the height of the Vietnam War and the Cold War at the same time. We were pretty sure that it was the start of The Big One, and that we would return to a Bay Area in radioactive ruins. All the way home, the radio in the antique VW bus that Kelley drove only delivered static, so we were pretty convinced that it was the end of the world, until we got far enough south to see normal traffic on US One and then, amazingly, the Golden Gate Bridge...

Turns out it was a Russian fighter, on 'loan' from the Israelis, being used to train Navy pilots against the then-enemy, but we were told later that we hadn't seen what we'd seen, if we knew what was good for us...