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How One Soviet Pilot Pulled The Sheet Off The Ghostly MiG-25

The MiG-25 Foxbat was an incredible rat rod of a plane—heavy, big and extraordinarily powerful—and it indirectly led to the development of Western planes like the F-15 Eagle. In the 1970s, the United States Air Force didn’t know much about it, until a Soviet pilot named Viktor Belenko decided to defect and landed one in Hakodate, Japan, 40 years ago today.

The fascinating story of how we learned about the MiG-25, as recounted by the BBC, starts with spy satellite footage that the West picked up, which showed a mysterious new Soviet jet. It had huge wings. It looked fast, from the blurry photographs we had of it. Nobody knew anything about it.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost.

Meanwhile, Soviet citizen and fighter pilot Belenko’s life was falling apart at home, a divorce looming. He also began to question the entirety of the Soviet system, and if the West was really as bad as he’d been told.

After realizing that the huge, new MiG-25 that he was being trained to fly was his ticket out, Belenko started plotting. The day he flew out for training—September 6, 1976—he also had a full tank of fuel and a route.

But it was really in the aftermath of Belenko’s flight that the full implications to hold, as the BBC notes:

Japan only really knew what they were dealing with when the MiG made its surprise landing. The Japanese suddenly found themselves with a defecting pilot – and a fighter jet that had so far evaded Western intelligence agencies. Hakodate’s airport suddenly became a hive of intelligence activity.

The CIA was scarcely able to believe its luck.

(Jalopnik.com)