Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even relatively small and local events evoked or involved heightened group responses. A heave of national paranoia resurfaced on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell, N.M., flying-saucer incident. So certain were an astounding number of Americans that a saucer did indeed crash in the desert near Roswell in 1947 that the Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, issued an explanation at the time that the vehicle in question had been a weather balloon. This past June, to keep the public calm, the Army published reassuring photos in the papers...
...another part of the alien-conscious nation, at Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, Calif., 39 disciples of the Heaven's Gate cult mixed phenobarbital, applesauce and vodka, slipped plastic bags over their heads and persuaded themselves that they were headed for a better life among the stars. Their suicide--the most lethal of the year's mass emotional activities--came in response to the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, an astronomical surprise that incited other public anxieties about the coming millennium...
...Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable, [but] as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." Schiller said that. Why does it happen? The "apocalypse now" theory has to do with the odd historical fact that people get exceptionally nervous as they near the end of any era. There were witch-hunts in the 1690s, episodes of hysteria in the 1890s. In our own time, one has only to reach back a couple of years to recall large-scale group fears induced by mention of the ozone layer, or by pandemics like toxic...
Maybe. The Kremlin has a credibility problem when it comes to presidential health. The first time officials announced Yeltsin had a head cold, while he was running for re-election in the summer of 1996, it turned out to be a loose synonym for a near fatal heart attack. For the rest of the year, he was prostrate and the country was paralyzed. A multiple-bypass operation in November 1996 seemed to bring a miracle recovery. Then two months later, Yeltsin came down with another "cold"--this time, his aides said, the result of a post-sauna chill. This cold...
...this makeshift exile center come moviemakers, camera crews and seekers from around the world, and from it, in the months before I returned to see him, the Dalai Lama had visited all five major continents, in his near desperate attempt to save occupied Tibet before it dies...