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The most famous sheep in history — the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, and the moment cloning jumped from science fiction to the dinner-table conversation. When Dolly was unveiled in 1997, she landed on magazine covers, triggered ethics panics, and made 'clone' a word every kid suddenly knew.
The Great Comet of 1997 — the bright, hanging smudge of light that had entire families standing in the driveway looking up. Visible to the naked eye for a record stretch, Hale-Bopp was the comet everyone actually saw, a shared sky-watching moment that also collided with one of the decade's strangest tragedies.
A 16th-century French seer who came roaring back as the year 2000 approached, thanks to one ominous quatrain about '1999, seventh month' and a King of Terror falling from the sky. Paperbacks, TV specials, and a spooky old Orson Welles documentary made Nostradamus the patron saint of millennium dread — and scared a lot of kids in the process.
Computers stored the year as two digits, so 2000 looked identical to 1900. By the late '90s, the fear that systems worldwide would catastrophically fail on January 1st had built to a fever pitch — and the world spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent a disaster that, when midnight arrived, barely happened at all.