For high school students applying to the University of Chicago, the application's essay section may seem a little offbeat. Actually, it might be right on beat - a rock 'n' roll one.

This year's application to the school asks prospective students to come up with their best conspiracy theories surrounding Elvis Presley, explaining how the King is alive and well and could even be doing some shopping.

"Here in the Office of College Admissions, we are persuaded that current Elvis sightings in grocery stores and laundromats are part of a wider conspiracy involving five of the following: the metric system, the Mall of America, the crash of the Hindenburg, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, lint, J.D. Salinger and wax fruit," the application reads.

The optional question asks applicants to "get to the bottom of this evil plot" in two pages or less.

About a third of applicants have answered the Elvis question, the admissions office reported. They passed over a "traditional" question about which factors comprise a neighborhood.

Responses to the Elvis question have been unique, said university officials.

"I think what happens is that they read the question and think, 'That's dumb,' but then it bugs them enough that they say, 'Those people, I'm going to show them!'" said Joseph Walsh, the academic adviser who wrote the question.

One student's response was in the form of a memo to President Clinton. She alleged in her essay that Presley is actually a scientist who faked his death so he could devote more time to working on physics theories.

The King, she explained, is developing a polymer coating that would prevent lint from forming on clothing.

What is more, he is "very angry that nothing has been done to incorporate the metric system into general use in America since President Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975," the applicant wrote.

Another applicant proposed that reclusive author Salinger is actually Jesse Aaron Presley, Elvis' fraternal twin presumed to have been born dead in 1935.

"Paranoid that his older twin's fame and overall 'phoniness' would distract from his artistic genius, Jesse changed his name to 'Jerome David Salinger' and since then has avoided public attention of all sorts," the student wrote.

Walsh said a surprising number of applicants have even expressed their Presley theories in verse.

At Chicago, off-the-wall application questions have become a tradition. Walsh said applicants tend to throw themselves into answering the unusual questions, whereas "traditional" types of prompts elicit more blasé replies.

"You see a real exuberance of doing a good job with this," he said. "If you ask, 'Tell us about the most meaningful moment of your life,' you don't get that exuberance."

One year, applicants were asked to write stories, incorporating their favorite country songs, about two people who met in the frozen food section of a supermarket.

At Chicago, a school with notoriously competitive admissions, the unusual essays help the admissions committee select the 1,000 incoming freshmen.

The university counts 69 Nobel Prize winners among its alumni, more than any other school, and the mean SAT score among Chicago students is between 1270 and 1480.

Walsh said the canny essay answers help the 10-member admissions committee gauge students' ingenuity. "It really does tell us something about a student," he said.

"If you're going to come here, you're going to really have to think it's fun, important and engaging to play with ideas."

But the reasons for including such a unique question in the application are not all academic, Walsh said.

The admissions committee, after all, has to sort through thousands of applications, so a little levity could go a long way.

"Nobody has more of an incentive to lighten this than the people who have to read through (the applications)," he said.