- Joined
- Dec 27, 2001
- Messages
- 1,139
THIS SITE has an article on the 'water witches', including info on a German study to prove dowsing can work...
Some of the strongest evidence for dowsing comes from Germany and the so-called "Scheunen" or "Barn" experiment. In 1987 and 1988, more than 500 dowsers participated in more than 10,000 double-blind tests set up by physicists in a barn near Munich. (Scheune is the German word for barn.) The researchers claim they empirically proved "a real dowsing phenomenon." Jim Enright of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography evaluated the data of the so-called "real dowsing phenomenon” and attributed it to chance.
Further evidence for water witching has been presented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) [the German Society for Technical Co-operation] sponsored by the German government. They claim, for example, that in some of their water dowsing efforts they had success rates above 80%, "results which, according to responsible experts, could not be reached by means of classical methods, except with disproportionate input." Of particular interest is a report by University of Munich physicist Hans-Dieter Betz, ‘Unconventional Water Detection: Field test of the Dowsing Technique in Dry Zones’ published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1995.
Betz ruled out chance and the use of landscape and geological features by dowsers as explanations for their success. He also ruled out "some unknown biological sensitivity to water." Betz thinks that there may be "subtle electromagnetic gradients" resulting from fissures and water flows that create changes in the electrical properties of rock and soil.
Water witches or dowsers, he thinks, somehow sense these gradients in a hypersensitive state. "I'm a scientist," says Betz, "and those are my best plausible scientific hypotheses at this point.... we have established that dowsing works, but have no idea how or why."
One water expert and former regional water adviser of the World Health organization, Dr. Edwin Lee, had this to say when asked about water witching, “There is no empirical basis for water divining, yet it works. Water witches have not studied hydrogeology academically, but they know it intuitively.”