Word: moonless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moonless night, and Jorge Macias Onate, a Mexican border-police officer, knows he'll be busy as he eases his Dodge Ram along his country's porous border with the U.S. Soon his headlights pick out four scraggly youths preparing to scale the 12-ft.-high steel fence that separates the town of Agua Prieta from Douglas, Ariz. As he slows the pickup, the teenagers scatter like rabbits toward the sagebrush. "Wait! Don't run! We're not here to arrest you," yells Macias. "We want to help you. The problem is on the other side...
...story, the sense of fate drawing him into its clutches, the broken ankle, his anxiety about the flight, the heavy traffic en route to the airport and the late takeoff, darkness setting in as he flew up the coast, the refusal to turn back, the radio silence, the nearly moonless night, the descent into the mist and the horizonless dark, and the terrible, spiraling fall...
...night was moonless, the kind of darkness that pilots liken to flying into a black hole. On the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lieut. John ("Tuba") Gadzinski inched the F-14 Tomcat forward so a deck crewman could hook it to the catapult that would hurl the fighter skyward at 260 km/h. In the Tomcat's backseat, radar-intercept officer Lieut. (j.g.) Kristin ("Rosie") Dryfuse glanced out the cockpit to another deckhand holding a lighted box that flashed "66,000 lbs.," (30 metric tons) the plane's weight. Dryfuse circled her flashlight to signal that the weight was correct...
...grim tale began around midnight on Tuesday, when villagers in the tiny Swiss farm community of Cheiry, 45 miles northeast of Geneva, saw the moonless sky lit by flames over the farmhouse of Albert Giacobino, a wealthy retired farmer who had bought the place four years ago. Firemen who arrived at the scene found Giacobino dead from a gunshot wound. Tacked to a door of the farmhouse was an audiocassette with a rambling taped discourse about earth, sky and astrological alignments...
...produced visible aggregations of buckyballs. At first, University of Arizona physicist Donald Huffman and his German colleague, Wolfgang Kratschmer, thought they had come up with nothing more extraordinary than a thimbleful of grimy soot. Then their microscope revealed a swarm of translucent specks that sparkled like stars in a moonless sky. "As soon as we saw these beautiful little crystals," Huffman recalls, "we knew we were looking at something no one had ever seen before...