----- Original Message -----

  Ed,

 

            I have been expecting your request and of course I will be more than happy to honor it. 

    A few facts about the picture must be considered . The picture was a project of mine generated

    by a need to express what we all felt about the sites and the duty that most of us underwent. The

    stark reality and hardships under which we served on some of those remote sites was not an easy

    thing to express. The one thing we all had in common that tied us to reality, regardless of our

    varied career specialties, was a visit from the real world. The "Bubble Check" was the one thing that

    reminded us that the real Air Force did not forget us in the middle of those god-forsaken places. The

    pilots knew that because they flew over most of us regularly and got to see how we existed so most

    took the chance with the "Bubble Check"  Spirits and morale jumped off the scale for the next couple

    of days and then we returned to the voices at the end of long distance  phones, most of which had no

    faces.

              I searched my slides for days looking for some of the pictures that  we took that we tried  

     to take when the event occurred. Trying to keep a 500MPH airplane in you camera sights is very

    difficult and we never had more than about 5-10 minutes warning, if we had any at all. I came up with

    some but with very little detail.  Search's among my friends came up the same way.

              Since I retired from the USAF, I have been involved heavily in the Computer fields so I turned

     to my graphics skills and built the composite that you see. The location of the Radar site means nothing

     other than the starkness that all of them had. The aircraft came from a slide taken at an Air Force airshow

     display in N.Carolina. The two were married on my computer and I sent one to Gene. He put it in his

     Radomes web site and you know the rest. At one time I was going to name it "A visit from the outside            

     world"  but "Bubble Check" was what we in Operations called it and as an Intercept Control Tech I took

    part in a number of them. So the "Bubble Check" was real in thousands of minds but fabricated in one.

    As some of my E-Mails stated,"Who cares where it came from, it ties us all together"

                If you still want the picture we will glad to supply it with full rights.

 

                                                                                                    Bob Fortmuller,USAF Ret