 Official investigations produced no evidence of widespread conspiracies or of the slaughter of thousands; only a small number of verified crimes have even remote similarities to tales of SRA.In the latter half of the 1990s, interest in SRA declined and skepticism became the default position, with very few researchers giving any credence to the existence of SRA.The SRA panic repeated many of the features of historical moral panics and conspiracy theories, such as the blood libel against Jews by Apion in the 30s CE, the wild rumors that led to the persecutions of early Christians in the Roman Empire, later allegations of Jewish rituals involving the killing of Christian babies and desecration of the Eucharist, and the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries.