"Lacking a real theory of petroleum formation, early petroleum geologists had assumed that oil and gas deposits must be located in zones similar to those where oil and gas had been found before. They looked, so to speak, for more Pitholes. Because few such areas were known, researchers believed that petroleum deposits therefore must be rare. In reality, new oil was found repeatedly--by wildcatters who, unaware of expert opinion, searched for it in all the wrong places. After many such stories, scientists had become persuaded that petroleum could be found in some form almost anywhere. The main obstacle to finding oil, the famed petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt wrote in 1952, was the conviction that it wasn't there: "Where oil is first found, in the final analysis, is the minds of men."