Professor Says It’s Art of Obtaining Information : Dowser Will Find Anything, From Well Sites to President’s Birthplace

Using nothing but a marble on a thread or two bent coat hangers, Robert Humphris says he can find water. Or the winner of a football game. Or whether his wife is home from work yet.

In fact, Humphris, an amateur dowser, says he can find the answer to just about any question he wants to ask.

“The imagination is the limit as to what you can do with dowsing,” said Humphris, an engineering professor at the University of Virginia here.

The traditional notion of dowsing, or divining, is a man using a forked tree branch to locate underground streams. That notion, Humphris said, is incomplete.

“Dowsing,” he said, “is the gift or the art of obtaining information with the help of a device.”

From Graves to Football

With his array of divining devices, Humphris has searched for--among other things--graves, Zachary Taylor’s birthplace and a buried culvert. Using a dowsing rod the way some persons use a Ouija board, Humphris has answered questions ranging from “Will it rain here today?” to “Will the Steelers beat the Colts?”

And, of course, he has searched for water. By his count, he has searched for locations for about 350 wells. Only 10 have come up dry, he said.

It is that success rate that has erased Humphris’ scientific misgivings about dowsing. Fifteen years after he first lifted a divining rod, he is still not sure why it works. But he knows it works.

A Skeptic at First

“I sure was a skeptic at first,” the gray-haired Humphris, 56, said while sipping iced coffee at a seafood restaurant here. “I keep having feelings of--’Here I am a scientist, what am I doing in this area? It just can’t work.’

“But just what I have seen has convinced me that there’s something there,” he said. “I’m convinced now.”

Humphris’ interest in divining began when his son was taught the art by a plumber for whom he was working. The son introduced dowsing to his father, who was skeptical but intrigued.

Ten years later, Humphris was taking a course in parapsychology when he chose dowsing as the subject of his term paper. His research fascinated him.

“That really got me hooked, because here it was well-documented,” Humphris said.

Now, he is an amateur dowser, clearly fascinated by the art and anxious to share his enthusiasm. He teaches classes in dowsing. He teaches dowsing to persons who hire him, so that they can do the job themselves next time. He has taught dowsing to his family, and they can all dowse--except for his brother and brother-in-law, geologists who remain cynical about dowsing.

Humphris said the key to dowsing is in the mind. Anyone who believes he can dowse can learn to dowse.

“Most anybody can do it,” he said. “Eight of 10 people can do it right off the bat. If you work at it, you gain confidence.”

Although dowsers in Texas rake in thousands of dollars for locating oil, Humphris makes little profit from his dowsing. He charges only 20 cents a mile and $35 if the well is successful--enough to cover his costs for attending the yearly American Society of Dowsers convention in Danville, Vt.

Little Chance of Funding

His work at the university has nothing to do with dowsing and, although he said he would love to research the subject, he doubts he could obtain funding.

“The scientific community as a whole is not receptive to dowsing,” he said.

That may be because there is no scientific explanation for dowsing.

One theory is that dowsing is linked to what Carl Jung called the collective subconscious, where all knowledge resides. The theory holds that everyone knows the answer to everything but most persons are unable to tap into the information because it is locked away in the subconscious. Dowsing is a way to unlock it.

The subconscious then sends the message by electrochemical impulse to the hands, which transfer it to the divining rod.

All this is done without conscious knowledge, Humphris said. Sometimes, even sophisticated scientific testing devices are unable to pick it up.

“The body doesn’t lend itself to empirical testing,” he said.

But for Humphris, the explanation is not important.

“You just have to have this faith, this belief.”