Dowsers Point the Way to Dispute

There is water somewhere below Tommy Hanson’s feet. He walks a grassy hillside looking for it, waiting for a profound interaction between man and coat hanger.

In Hanson’s fists are two L-shaped lengths of hanger pointing straight ahead. He takes a step, holding the hangers like two guns at belly level. The metal pieces swivel inward to form an X, clinking softly.

Eureka!

The water is directly below, some 300 feet down.

Hanson knows this because he has already drilled a well--a gusher--here on his father’s land based on faith in his hangers. A professional well-driller, Hanson says he has found water this way maybe 200 times over 33 years, with a 90% success rate.

Hanson is a dowser, a finder of subterranean water or other treasures. In the hands of dowsers, metal rods turn, forked sticks pull downward and pendulums swing, seemingly on their own accord.

There are some theories: perception of energy fields, clairvoyance, dumb luck, self-delusion. Scientists in search of an answer have analyzed brain waves and run field tests. But evidence of dowsing’s validity remains mostly anecdotal.

Hanson cheerfully acknowledges that he doesn’t know how it works. He just accepts it. He dowses for some customers; if they don’t want him that’s fine. “People are negative about what they don’t understand,” he says.

Dowsing, sometimes called water witching, is ages old. Proponents spot evidence of dowsing in ancient drawings and in an Old Testament passage describing water gushing after Moses struck a rock with his staff. There are accounts of dowsers working in German and English mines a few centuries ago.

A common dowsing instrument is a Y-shaped branch, one fork in each hand, a tip tilting down as a dowser passes over water. Many modern dowsers say wood loses its effectiveness when it dries out, so they’ve switched to plastic. Hanson, 39, sticks with wire, or sometimes fresh branches.

Even veterans, like 56-year-old Leroy Bull of Doylestown, Pa., concede that amateurs can succeed. About 496 out of 500 people can get at least a little dowsing reaction, he says. After all, there’s not much to it: Hold your instrument, walk straight, keep your mind on the task.

“You can’t have thoughts like you’re having a fight with your wife because it interferes,” says Craig Elliott, a dowser from North Egremont, Mass. “I call them monkey thoughts.”

The search is usually for water. But dowsing also has been used to search for minerals, people, treasure, missing car keys.

Some practitioners claim the related ability to “map dowse”--that is, find water or other hidden objects by studying a map. Elliott recalls how his father would invite customers at his general store to sketch out street maps on scraps of butcher paper; he would then draw where streams or creeks were.

Elliott, 47, and Hanson are traditional dowsers: They look for water. Like old-schoolers practicing a skill handed across generations, Elliott learned dowsing from his father. Hanson learned it from a traveling salesman.

Other dowsers may be more contemporary, attuned to the New Age. To them, dowsing is more than a way to find water. They take pendulum in hand for answers to all sorts of questions: Is my child in school? Are these vegetables fresh? Will I like this book?

Bull, for instance, keeps a pendulum by his phone in case someone calls in search of answers. Clockwise means yes. Counterclockwise, no.

He likens a dowser to an antenna picking up natural vibrations. He notes with satisfaction that some physicists now theorize that infinitesimal vibrating strings are the building blocks of the universe.

“We’ve been standing around with our hands on our hips waiting for the scientific community to come bumbling along,” Bull says.

Old-schoolers offer a more basic explanation: that they sense changes in electromagnetic fields as they step above aquifers. In fact, traditionalists will sometimes look askance at the pendulum-swingers.

Other critics claim it’s all nonsense, that dowsing sticks gyrate to the holder’s subconscious will. “These are persons who are genuinely, thoroughly self-deceived,” James Randi, a prominent debunker of claims of paranormal phenomena, writes on his Web page.

Robert Park, a physics professor who directs the Washington office of the American Physical Society, suggests that some water dowsers may have a talent for picking up clues from the landscape. He knows of no widely accepted study demonstrating dowsing ability.

“It is curious that the thing is so persistent,” Park says. “But then again, how long has astrology been around?”

One large-scale German study in the late ‘80s involved dowsers trying to divine the location of water pipes beneath the floorboards of a barn. The success rate for most dowsers was nearly equal to chance, though researchers did find a few dowsers with a high success rate. Skeptics claim the German researchers overstated the success rate of those few dowsers by only including their best runs.

Some dowsers disparage all such field tests, saying their talent cannot be tested under artificial conditions. However, the American Society of Dowsers, in Danville, Vt., sponsored a study indicating that dowsers’ brain waves show measurable changes during dowsing.

As Bull laughingly sums up: “For those who don’t believe, no amount of evidence is enough. And for those who do believe, no evidence is necessary.”

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On the Net:

The American Society of Dowsers: https://dowsers.new-hampshire.net

James Randi Educational Foundation: https://www.randi.org/research/challenge/dowsing.html