Having fighters scramble from Eilison was not unusual at all, and when hunting out in that area with my father we saw a few of those. It was pretty distinct from the training and combat training they did, so it wasn’t that hard to distinguish the intentionality and risk tolerance that was reserved for that kind of urgency.
Anecdotally, I’m pretty darn sure that I saw a bear flying overhead just a few miles east-southeast of Fairbanks. I watched it be turned by 3 F4 phantoms. I was with my father and a few of his friends, as well as my brother that would have been 13 at the time. Everyone there remembers the event, and it was talked about for days in Fairbanks, we even had a subsequent training the next week in my elementary school on survival in the event of a nuclear attack lol.
Perhaps it was some kind of clandestine fuckery, perhaps it was an authorized flight, or perhaps it would have been to embarrassing / inflammatory to make it an event of record? I’m sure the answers are quietly sitting somewhere in a musty filing box.
It makes it pretty real when 7 year old me is wondering if this one has any nukes on board, and if this will be the day that they drop.
Russia is not to be trusted, imho. They do not honor their international commitments in good faith, and they will expand their territorial claims if they are allowed to do so. Europe, like a frog in a pot, is in peril and they need to take steps to make sure that Russian war fighting capabilities are destroyed through exhaustion in Ukraine.
This of course is tragic for Ukraine, because it means that she will be utterly razed in the process. But if Russia prevails or backs down with strength, it will happen again. And again.
Russias ability to project force in a strategic way must be destroyed. They are not trustworthy stewards of coercive force.