Ronald Pindak, David E. Moncton, Stephen C. Davey, and John W. Goodby, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, experimentally confirm for the first time the hexatic phase predicted two years earlier by Halperin and Nelson. Using free-standing liquid crystal film techniques and X-ray diffraction, they study a smectic B liquid crystal phase and find exactly the two signatures the theory predicted: short-range positional correlations within the plane — like a liquid — but long-range, three-dimensional six-fold (hexagonal) bond-orientational order — like a solid. The authors themselves explicitly interpret their results as a system of interacting two-dimensional hexatic layers, precisely confirming the language and theoretical framework Halperin and Nelson had proposed. This finding opened the door to decades of research on the hexatic phase in liquid crystals, colloids, vortices in superconductors, and other two-dimensional systems.