The incident was widely reported in Western media at the time and I have no reason to doubt its veracity.
I know little about the site I linked that claims the Russians sent (emailed, I imagine) pictures of the flyover to the Kitty Hawk’s website admins.
As to the rest of your questions, I don’t have those answers.
I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to point out a couple of thoughts about the scene in “the movie” that are pertinent (which makes this something of a IMHO response to a GQ post):
While the camera work does imply that the MiGs were within visual range, I don’t think it was that explicit. The MiGs fired a huge salvo of birds, perhaps BVR, and even when the BPMDS (didn’t notice any other defenses that got online in time) got a bunch, two struck the carrier.
Two things to note:
(1) The Aegis system is good, but plenty of the Pentagon folk will admit that there’s a lot of Russian missiles (and aircraft to carry them) specifically designed to defeat it. It’s easy to forget that no modern carrier group has ever had to deal with an actual attack by current, state-of-the-art Russian fighters equipped with those anti-ship missiles.
(2) The intermittent contact reported in the movie should have instantly activated the close-in defense systems, regardless of whether or not the OOD was consulted.
’Uigi: The Sparrow system is the BPMDS (Basic Point Defence Missile System). I think you’re thinking of the [Vulcan] Phalanx CIWS (Close In Weapon System).
FWIW I spent many, many hours standing alert 5 watch. The alert 5 aircraft is not on the catapult and doesn’t even have the engine turning but the crew is strapped in. During my two cruises to the Northern Arabian Sea in the early eighties we usually had two aircraft on alert five any time there weren’t planes actually in the air. IIRC our record from a cold engines to WOW (weight off wheels) was 2:35 even though the F-14 isn’t a particularly fast plane to launch. IIRC the GTC-85 huffer was turning so we weren’t cheating too much. A launch that fast skips niceties like stablizing the intertial navigation platform. Newer INS systems with a ring laser gyro could be stablized and I’m sure planes like the F-18 can launch quicker.
Alert 1 is engine turning on the catapult. I never saw that. Alert 15 is crew in the ready room. Alert 30 is crew in cabins.
Damn… I was so anxious to reply to 'Uigi’s comment about the BPMDS that I accidently mentioned it instead of the Phalanx. I meant to say
Welcome, Boo Boo Foo!
Actually, as a former submariner, I especially felt for those poor bastards on the Kursk. Bad way to go.
Just out of interest, which film are we talking about?
I’ll spill the beans since it was me who posted the first question (an thank you all for the replies, it has been very educational 
).
The film is Sum Of All Fears, the new one by Tom Clancy
Rick
Ack!
That was my reply. I forgot that Brynda had logged in.
The spoiler tihng worked well though
Rick
(where’s that smack forehead smiley when you need him)
The Russian buzzing of the carrier did happen, and I also heard (through the grapevine) about the photo thing.
Boo Boo Foo, unless it’s a joint exercise (which I don’t think we do with Russia nowadays), we would never let them in on our tactics (even through an exercise scenario). So, if you’re not in the exercise, you may know that it’s happening, but you won’t know what’s happening in it. I assume the same is true for the Russians. As to why they’d do it… I have no clue. It’s great way to test our battle group’s defenses. For all we know, the plan for those guys could have been to head toward the carrier and turn back once challenged on the radio. And that probably didn’t happen. They were probably just as surprised to find themselves over the carrier as we were. I doubt there was anything more sinister to it.
Any other ex-squids not surprised to hear of the Russians buzzing a carrier?
When I was active on the Enterprise, the Russians used to buzz us all of the time to watch UNREP. I believe the plane was known as a “Bear”, but I could be mistaken. Anyway, they regularly flew over in these planes with big camera pods affixed to them to take pictures of UNREP, because they supposedly did not have that capability.