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Dowsing

Why doesn't someone create a testing ground. A large field with just a few bits of water or metal underneath. If several people in a row (experienced dowsers) can pin-point these things, then mystery solved - right? All you have to do is prove that their odds of locating the items are well above chance (70% or greater) - something like that.

I didn't read the 9 pages so maybe someone already discussed this and it's old news.
 
There was a Dowsing machine at a Fortean Exhibition at the Croydon Clocktower years ago. It had a central drum split into six sections, one of which contained water. On top, there was a choice of twigs and rods. I remember having a go. I pressed the start button and the drum span round and stopped. I walked around it with the rods until they crossed and pressed the button on the one which I thought contained water. It gave a green light. I did this about five times getting it right each time. As I put the rods back I noticed a small crowd had gathered behind me looking rather bemused by the whole thing.
 
If you click the Local News button on the BBC News website you can select your location (eg, Cornwall http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/england/cornwall/ ) and there's a useful panel there on Things to Do.

Here's one of Fortean interest:
SUN 17 MAR
Try Dowsing
Kit Hill Country Park, Callington

Run by: Cornwall Council

Have a go at the ancient art of dowsing. We will look for water, archaeological remains, minerals, ley lines and more.

10:00–13:00
Suitable for any age

£2.00 adults/£1.50 concessions/£6.00 family (2A+3C)
Kit Hill is a mile or so north east of Callington, and maybe 12 miles from Pymouth (less from Tavistock or Liskeard).
 
My pal in Majorca was having a well dug recently and a local fella dutifully came along to find the underground water source. In no time flat (according to my pal) the man successfully pendulum dowsed the source. Quite taken a back his wife inquired how in the name of all things scientific he'd located the water? By way of demonstration he took his pendulum and stood over the hose pipe lying unused. He bid them, turn on the tap and as the water passed through the pipe the pendulum turned. My pal's wife wanted a go at this and repeated the sequence of events with the empty hose followed by the tap turned on. Not a sausage. Whereupon the fella placed his hands on her shoulders and what do you know? Success, the pendulum rotated.
 
My pal in Majorca was having a well dug recently and a local fella dutifully came along to find the underground water source. In no time flat (according to my pal) the man successfully pendulum dowsed the source. Quite taken a back his wife inquired how in the name of all things scientific he'd located the water? By way of demonstration he took his pendulum and stood over the hose pipe lying unused. He bid them, turn on the tap and as the water passed through the pipe the pendulum turned. My pal's wife wanted a go at this and repeated the sequence of events with the empty hose followed by the tap turned on. Not a sausage. Whereupon the fella placed his hands on her shoulders and what do you know? Success, the pendulum rotated.

Could he do that if he didn't know when the water was on or off?
 
I had to get a well dug several years ago in an area that is notoriously difficult for wells - either there is no water, it ends up being salty, or has a very low GPM. So I was pretty anxious about it turning into a very expensive problem.
I hired an older gentleman who said he was a water witcher. He came out, broke a forked branch off of a nearby tree, and started at the bottom of the hill by the neighbors well. He witched the underground stream flowing to that well and followed it zig zagging halfway up the hill on my property, stopped and pointed and said 'right here'. I gulped and said 'sure why not'. The whole process barely took five minutes with no hint of woo-woo about it.
Sure enough, when he drilled it turned out to be exactly the right spot less than 150 ft down and good water with 12 GPM (good for that area).
The interesting thing is that he told me it was only after having a recent heart attack that he was able to develop this ability, and he had been in the well drilling business for many years before then. Doesn't a heart attack disrupt ones electromagnetic field? Maybe that field is the key...
 
Many years ago, I was working as a volunteer steward for Fringe Sunday (a day of free entertainment, held in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival). One marquee was run by the Edinburgh Science Festival. Curiously, they were running a dowsing experiment in a large, roped-off area by the side of the tent. Somehow I ended up helping out and showing members of the public how to dowse for a water pipe using metal rods. Fascinating results, too - throughout the day, many people (including myself) would get the crossed rods at the same points, marking a diagonal line in one corner of the square. This was, according to a person from the Science Festival, where the pipe was. Interestingly, the people who had an open mind about the whole thing got the best results - the "pah this is nonsense" people only got random twitches.
 
I've tried this myself (in the past) with home-made rods (broom handle and welding rod). At the time, I thought it interesting that I could get 'hits' with no conscious awareness of moving the rods. It occurred to me then (and again now), that it ought to be a simple matter to rig up a few electrodes on the arms and do some double-blind testing to see if some folk can detect pipes or water in this way.

As the nervous system is more of less electric, it's not out of the realms of possibility that a pipe or water body can interfere with the body's standing electrical field and with training we might recognize this.

Originally, wasn't dowsing done with a hazel fork which was kept under some pressure so that it'snapped' down when passed over water?
 
I've heard it said (probably on this thread!) that dowsing implements act as 'amplifiers' for tiny physical responses in our hands. We are the dowsers; rods and twigs are just tools that help pinpoint what we detect. The tools themselves have no special properties.
 
I've heard it said (probably on this thread!) that dowsing implements act as 'amplifiers' for tiny physical responses in our hands. We are the dowsers; rods and twigs are just tools that help pinpoint what we detect. The tools themselves have no special properties.
I think there's something in that. I've never tried dowsing for water, but I have been able to get the rods to show me yes or no responses - I retain an open mind as to what is actually prompting the responses, the rods - to me - are just indicators. They were just bent bits of coat hanger, and I was sitting at a friend's kitchen table, rather than doing or using anything more esoteric. The thing that only just occurred to me tonight is that I have been shown a couple of kinesiology techniques (no rods necessary), both of which revolve around yes/no responses. So is kinesiology just dowsing with A-levels?
 
Well, here's a cross-threader, but I guess it starts here...
Penzance dowsing chimney sweep seeks help in proving autism theory
By cmjohnw | Posted: June 16, 2016

A West Cornwall dowser wants the parents of children with autism to contact him so that he can help prove a life-changing theory.
Donald Rowe, a chimney sweep and brother to Jethro and Les, the former landlord of The Dock Inn, says he is also a 'dowser'.

He claims that when dowsing he can detect hotspots ('geolographic points') of the 'power-flow' (earth energy) structure which will in some cases cause autism spectrum disorder.

"These geolographic points don't occur in a very significant concentration in the earth and are manifest at about 95 paces apart," said Mr Rowe. "I need to find more homes where there has been, or is an autistic person so that I can confirm my earlier findings.

"All I will need is the occupier's permission to walk around the outside of the house where an infant was first affected by the disorder with my divining rod in order to establish whether or not the specific vortex exists which could have caused the condition.
"As well as identifying the hotspots which potentially help cause autism, Mr Rowe believes that he can suppress them safely and cheaply and hopes that the medical establishment will take his research seriously.

"It is not yet known whether or not my work will create healing in existing autistic children," he added.
"Further research, I anticipate, will make the process next door to free and will be available right across the world."If you are a parent of a child with autism who would be happy for Mr Rowe to dowse outside your property, email [email protected]

http://www.cornishman.co.uk/penzanc...utism-theory/story-29408611-detail/story.html
 
We had a fun and instructive dowsing adventure last week. Not dowsing for water, though. We were dowsing for phones. :)

My 15 year old son had lost his phone and had run out of ideas where it might be. Since he only uses the phone with wi-fi, there's no SIM card - so we couldn't call to locate it. I also searched for it but came up with nothing. All we knew was that it must be in the house.

At this point in the search, I decided to resort to my tried and true method, pendulum dowsing. I also decided to get son in on tne action. He's very interested in this sort of thing, and it was his phone, after all.

I drew two simple maps of the house, and cut two pieces of thread. I used my ring for a pendulum, son used a doodad from his keychain. We went into seperate rooms so we wouldn't influence each other, and hovered over our maps hoping for a result.

We both had a very strong ndication that the phone was in a certain area of the living room, to the right of the couch. There is a small table/ bookcase there, but we'd already searched it several times. The pendulum had been insistant, though.

We took all the books out and moved the table to search the entire area. Voila, phone! It had slipped down a crack in the back of the bookcase and been hidden from view.

Son was overjoyed - he had his phone back and had a Fortean experience. A fine way to start the morning. :D
 
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...t-using-divining-rods-to-find-leaks-and-pipes

Ten of the 12 water companies in the UK have admitted they are still using the practice of water dowsing despite the lack of scientific evidence for its effectiveness.

The disclosure has prompted calls for the regulator to stop companies passing the cost of a discredited medieval practice on to their customers. Ofwat said any firm failing to meet its commitments to customers faced a financial penalty.

Dowsers, or water witchers, claim that their divining rods cross over when the presence of water is detected below ground. It is regarded as a pseudoscience, after numerous studies showed it was no better than chance at finding water.

Some water companies, however, insisted the practice could be as effective as modern methods.

The discovery that firms were still using water diviners was made by the science blogger Sally Le Page, after her parents reported seeing an engineer from Severn Trent “walking around holding two bent tent pegs to locate a pipe” near their home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Le Page asked Severn Trent why it was still using divining rods to find pipes when there was no evidence that it worked.

Replying on Twitter, the company said: “We’ve found that some of the older methods are just as effective than the new ones, but we do use drones as well, and now satellites.”
 
The bought rods I have seen for sale seem to be just bent welding rods
or rather one cut in two with a loose plastic sleeve over the bit you hold
so they swing with less friction.
 
Just because they don't know how it works doesn't mean it doesn't work. :)
 
Just because they don't know how it works doesn't mean it doesn't work. :)

I'm in two minds about this. I know there's no scientific evidence for it (yet) and properly conducted trials give results no better than chance. However, I've tried dowsing with others with good results...
 
I'm in two minds about this. I know there's no scientific evidence for it (yet) and properly conducted trials give results no better than chance. However, I've tried dowsing with others with good results...

Really, I have no idea if it works or not, but many people use it as a normal thing. Assuming that if it does work it is the result of a sense we normally underuse rather than some form of witchy magic, I think it is worth proper investigation from a neutral standpoint, instead of the sceptical approach that everyone claiming to be a dowser is a charlatan.

I'm talking purely about 'direct' dowsing, not remote dowsing in which I have no belief at all.
 
Really, I have no idea if it works or not, but many people use it as a normal thing. Assuming that if it does work it is the result of a sense we normally underuse rather than some form of witchy magic, I think it is worth proper investigation from a neutral standpoint, instead of the sceptical approach that everyone claiming to be a dowser is a charlatan.

Strangely, when I did a hands-on demonstration of dowsing on Fringe Sunday many years ago, the results did seem to depend on attitude. The skeptics who said "Pah, it'll never work" found nothing. The open-minded ones scored a lot of hits. Might at least partially be due to the naysayers not even trying to hold the rods properly.
 
I came upon this thread by chance and thought I would add a couple of comments. As many will know, when researching a local time slip mystery, I came upon evidence -- first noticed by the local historian -- that time slips are associated in some way with the earth energy detected by dowsers. Obviously I looked a bit into the history of dowsing, with some results that proved extremely interesting. The first thing I found was that there was no serious scientific research in this country prior to the late 1980s. Most of the studies involved burying various objects, metals, or containers of water and seeing whether subjects could detect them. This may have seemed logical at the time, but it betrayed what now seems to be a basic ignorance of both dowsing and geology. When dowsers seek water they are seeking water in movement, either through underground channels or through permeable strata. Finding a single container of water would be of no value to someone trying to find a viable supply for a village or farm. Likewise searching for oil or veins of precious metals would not be helped by finding small isolated targets just below the surface. It seems to me that most of these studies were conducted not to find out how dowsing worked -- because it does clearly work in real situations -- but to "prove" that it doesn't.

The first UK scientist to do a genuine scientific investigation of dowsing was Vincent Reddish. He had recently ended his career as Astronomer Royal of Scotland, and by accident came across an example of the use of dowsing to locate a buried pipe. He found that he could dowse himself, and began a series of systematic investigations. He found evidence that what dowsers were detecting was a kind of energy that he termed "The D Force", which behaved exactly like a classical EM wave, in that it interacted with linear structures to produce interference effects. He found that the energy came up his body from his feet, and also found evidence that, far from resulting from unconscious movements, acted directly upon the dowsing rods.

After he self published a book entitled The D-Force: A Remarkable Phenomenon, he was contacted by the Ministry of Defence. Not only were they interested in earth energy, but they were interested in possibly using it as a way of communicating with submarines. They also informed him about Russian research into a very controversial field, that of torsion energy, which they thought might underlie the D Force. Reddish went on to confirm some of the Russian findings, and with the aid of a small team of ex colleagues, showed that the strength of the dowsing energy varied with the season, confirming that the torsion fields of the Earth and the Sun were interacting to produce his D Force. He also confirmed that torsion could be modulated in on/off manner to communicate using Morse.

In addition to this, it is worth noting the work of Russian dowsing researchers. (They never made the connection between dowsing and torsion -- it seems the MoD figured this out themselves.)

Shortly before he died Reddish wrote another book, The Field of Rotating Masses. It is still possible to find 2nd hand copies of both books on Abe.

If anyone wants to check out torsion energy, note that the relevant Wikipedia entry has been hijacked by someone who believes that it is all pseudo science and fraud. In fact he is talking only about the claims of two out of around 80 Russian researchers, against whom he has conducted a personal vendetta. Sadly, as is the case with dowsing phenomena, people in the "pro" camp are all too often infected (if that's the right word) with New Age thinking, and disentangling the basic facts from the hype is difficult.
 
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This and following posts regarding dowsing transplanted from the UK Ley-Line Map thread:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/uk-ley-line-map.63962/page-2
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Agreed, "energy" is a term that has specific meanings in certain physical contexts, but it is as good as any other in this area even if we can't precisely define it in the same way as we can in more established fields of science.

The problem for me is that I don't think dowsing involves any energy except that attributed to holding a stick and walking. We've never been able to measure ANY energy/force/signal/thing related to dowsing (except expectation). So, I reject the term entirely as applied to dowsing (and other supposed occult forces).
 
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I never heard anything about this. What references would you recommend?



The problem for me is that I don't think dowsing involves any energy except that attributed to holding a stick and walking. We've never been able to measure ANY energy/force/signal/thing related to dowsing (except expectation). So, I reject the term entirely as applied to dowsing (and other supposed occult forces).

People find underground water by dowsing. The jury's out on how it works.
 
People find underground water by dowsing. The jury's out on how it works.
I entirely disagree with this characterization. The water is there for anyone to find, no witching (or jury) needed. But an eye and a feel for the land does help. So, as a hydrogeologist, I don't think divination works. At all. But, as typically happens, let the "knowers" who have tried it yell at me that "it worked" for them. More stories (than you can shake a forked stick at) aren't going to sway me. See here for my professional take on dowsing. (And that's all I'm going to say about dowsing in this thread.)
 
I spoke to a hydrologist many years ago about dowsing. In his professional opinion it was bollox. He said if you dig a hole almost anywhere in the UK you will find water, at most just a few tens of feet down.

Some common sense of how the land lies helps. For example I expect it's easier to find water near the surface in a valley, than on a hill. Maybe dowsers just have a more developed appreciation of that!
 
People find underground water by dowsing. The jury's out on how it works.
There is no doubt that dowsing does work, but it is not restricted to finding water -- many professional dowsers have made a good living finding mineral deposits for big corporations. Reddish was the first person to find evidence about how it works, and it was the Ministry of Defence that first noted a connection between Reddish's findings and the Russian work on torsion. Afterwards Reddish and a small team found evidence that the energy detected by dowsers is torsion generated by the earth and the sun, refracted by geological and other features. How or why it is associated with time slips and other phenomena is the real mystery.
 
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