Dowsing: Fact or Fiction

I saw a TV programme some years ago where a guy made a living from dowsing for underground springs. Can anybody do it ?

The history of dowsing
The history of dowsing or water witching:

http://www.forestry.state.al.us/publication/TF_publications/TFfall03/Folklore_Water_Witching.pdf

the uSGs and the National WAter Well Association both have published opinions that state that 2 things you can do unfailingly
1you can predict that it will stop raining

2you can point almost anywhere and say that water can be found underground.

Skeptical Inquirer 1983 9winter) did a report about a kid who did a controlled study of dowsing .
His conclusions: Dowsing ,in studies using controlled conditions, doesnt succeed any better than does chance.

Most dowsed wells are poor producers because they were essentially randomized. (NWWA rept by Jay Lehr)

I doubt that dowsers were used to locate tunnels dug by the viet Cong , because when i was in grad school in the mid 70s, my one geophys instructors had returned from a tour of duty in the late 60s wherein he was using microgravity and resistivity and seismic echoing to do the same thing with 100% assurance. Anyway, we had very good airphoto capabilities to find surface expressions of tunnels. We used U2s to take strips of film that were capable of locating stuff in 10 mi wide strips. i cannot believe wed risk lives with something that cant be proven to work.

There are dowsers who will work from a map, or use a watch, or welding rods. If you get 10 dowsers , youl locate maybe 7 different optimal locations and the 3 that agree wont be the best locations

They say that dowsers use a lot of visual cues , like when they locate water in a field, they look around at wetlands or sycamore trees or linear draws in the dry lands. They locate old sewers by the depressions or the smell.

when I first purchased my farm I had a bad sewage system and the plumber came in with a backhoe. To my surprise he dowsed the pipe and when he dug down, NO pipe. (Hed keyed on a pipe that had an elbow in the basement. Turns out that pipe had been closed off shortly after my house was no longer used as a tavern. I had the plumber locate the collector drain from the 9then) inside drains and I borrowed a set of geophones from the labs. While he banged on the pipes I set the geophones and recorded the sound levels from the surface. as I kept moving the geophones closer we zeroed in the sound. I marked the area with a red flag and had him dig carefully at that point. Walla. Hhe said he was thinking of going there next. I told him that my sewage line wasnt the only thing that was full of ****. I then got him a beer and said his secret was safe with me.

Believers in dowsing will never admit error, in fact, they will defy proven science. I can find the edge and the total outline of a grave with a slim bronze ground rod used for lightning rod systems. You keep plunging the rod into the soil and you can locate the old grave site by the lack of pressure resistance you feel as you push the rod into the ground. Natural soil is cohesive and theres a lot of resistance to pushing the rod into soil.
Where a hole has been dug, even if its 200 years old, the soil cohesion is gone and you can push the rod strait in easily. I usually carry red survey flags and mark edges of resistance v no resistance. you wind up hitting the exact spot after less than 10 pushes.
I once did a forensic job where I had to locate a vehicle that the cops expected was buried in a field but the field had been plowed and grass grown for about 10 years. (It was a cold case)
I used a magnetometer and located a big metal mass with a square "Van like" shape. I then pushed my rods into the ground and could locate the native soil and the excavated soil zones and both were under an 18" plow layer. I mapped the location and went away. I was asked for a report the next day. It seems that there was a buried van with the passenger , a business associate of the major suspect, still on board. the cops, I later found out, first asked a group of dowsers to try their hand "for free". They failed. They were amish dowsers who, as was their excuse, the van and passenger represented an energy field that was of a negative energy and the Amish were unable to make their mojo work.
A metallic object is a piece of cake for a magnetometer. I was a little pissed at the cops for their belief in the occult. Even if they found something, an attorney on the defense side could argue illegal search, since it would have been a , more or less random hit by incredible dumb luck. They couldnt argue that with a mag, since it is a search tool that I focused on an area that was bounded by the polices desired areas of investigation.

If a dowser can, by luck, find a decent water supply on a tract of land, I could, using geophysics and air photo analysis, locate a water supply many times over the rate that the dowser finds. Of this Im certain

Thanks farmer, I just learned a whole lot.

none of it useful though.

Is it just me, or did the colors on a2k change? My blues look more like Indigo

No telling what we could do without all these electronic gizmo's......discover fire, invent the wheel, get dowsed...