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151 A November 1973 Gallup Poll showed that 51% of adult Americans believed UFOs were real. Eleven percent—a projected 15 million people— said they had seen one. Here, in Jacobs’ words, was a phenomenon that virtually the entire adult population had heard about and that millions of people claimed to have seen, yet no one knew for sure what it was.” At the Highest Level During his presidential campaign in 1976, Jimmy Carter revealed that he had seen a UFO in 1969. He vowed that if he became President he would make public every piece of information that the United States had about UFOs. After Carter took office in 1977, White House Science Adviser Frank Press recommended that NASA form a small panel of inquiry to see if there had been any new significant findings on UFOs since the Condon Report. NASA Administrator Robert Frosch replied that while NASA was willing to continue responding to public inquiries, he recommended taking no steps to establish a research activity in this area or to convene a symposium on this subject. The last great wave of UFO sightings took place in 1973. After that, most reports of extraterrestrial visitors took other forms.** Extravagant claims and hoaxes continued to damage the credibility of UFO studies. One famous example is the alleged UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Some claimed that the wreckage included the bodies of aliens and that the UFO and its crew were taken to U.S. government facilities for further studies. Most detached observers now believe that this conspiratorial scenario was generated by a military cover story intended to disguise the wreck of a classified U.S. balloon system.* Another focus for conspiracy theories has been Area 51, a U.S. Air Force base at Groom Lake, Nevada. Since the base was established in the 1950s to test the U-2 spy plane, its cloaked existence has fueled specula- tions about more exotic activities such as studying the technology of UFOs. A 1997 Air Force report stating that there were no captured aliens has not deterred such allegations.*° Two other phenomena generated widespread media coverage and public interest. One was crop circles, which began appearing in English grain fields in 1978 and later spread to other countries. The simplest patterns— which initially may have been caused by atmospheric vortices—later diver- sified into many shapes in addition to circles. Allegedly, some of these markings were caused by UFOs. Yet, as skep- tics pointed out, their number and complexity seemed to increase with Conspiracies, Crop Circles, and Abductions Conspiracies, Crop Circles, and Abductions