This MiG Super Fighter Terrified NATO. - THEN A SOVIET PILOT STOLE ONE.

One jet was clocked at 2,400 mph and the U.S. didn't have a single aircraft that could catch it.

- Cory Graff

Throughout the early 1970s, the Soviet MiG-25 streaked through the nightmares of America’s military and intelligence communities. If the Cold War ever turned hot, they feared, this seemingly unstoppable fighter, codenamed Foxbat, appeared poised to sweep Western aircraft from the skies.

The first hints of the existence of this Soviet superplane had begun to materialize in 1965, when a Russian prototype jet, designated Ye-155, set a world record with an impressive speed run of 2,319 kilometers per hour (1,441 mph). In the years that followed, the West nervously watched as updated versions of the Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau's quick-climbing, high-flying, ultrafast jet continued to shatter records. Observers knew that the Ye-155 would soon be more than an experimental testbed.

In the summer of 1967, the U.S. military obtained clear pictures of the mystery aircraft. At a flying exhibition near Moscow, an American delegation clicked away with their cameras as three Ye-155s zoomed past the rapt crowd. The rolls of film that the delegation shot that day were immediately dispatched across the Atlantic; just hours later, the film landed in the waiting hands of Foreign Technology Division officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

It was up to James W. Doyle, who'd been an aircraft performance analyst with the U.S. Air Force, to assign a new NATO code name. "Foxbat was used for the plane that I perceived as having the most mystical capabilities," he noted.

The streamlined Foxbat fighter had oversize intakes that fed a pair of massive afterburner-equipped turbojets. The Foxbat's twin exhausts had a diameter of nearly 60 inches. Above them was a pair of angular vertical tails.