Water divination! It's real!

a reply to: Phage

Yes, I get that, but when the point is to demonstrate if something is possible, only to oneself and not in order to convince others, TheRedneck's suggestions will do just fine.

Please do share the results of your experiments with us, when you've written up your paper.

a reply to: Hammaraxx

Roger Wilco

Please let us know of your results. Either way.

a reply to: Hammaraxx

Technically, Phage is correct. A control in this case would be an area where there were absolutely no water sources, but where you were not aware of that. One could look at the size of the yard surveyed as opposed to the number of water lines (typically 1 or 2 of you have neighbors) as being a sort of control, I suppose, but technically no, it is not.

The largest difficulty comes from realizing that even developed areas often have natural water sources underground and these are often not previously known. That is, after all, the actual purpose of water witching. Thus, unless one conducts a sonar image of the area, one cannot actually have a control. Keep that in mind when you are surveying; a false positive may not actually be false. That prevents a personal curiosity experiment from being 'controlled.'

Sonar images can be pricey and can take a lot of time, plus the results would be available to you if you hired it done. A truly controlled blind or double-blind experiment would be fairly extravagant for your purpose.

So, I still stand by my suggestion. It can be conducted cheaply and quickly, and has sufficient control for a qualitative examination.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Phage

I second Hammaraxx's request. Please let us know of your results. And remember i am available if needed.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Phage
What you seem unable to understand about this is that if you have the ability to do it, you don't get false positives. The success rate is 100%. If you don't have the ability you won't get any false or true positives because the rods simply don't ever cross. People who can't witch can walk across a field full of pipes and the rods never move. If you have the dowsing ability, you can walk across non-piped fields and the rods don't move.

For many years at the local hospital the head nurse in the OB department could dowse twins and triplets with a pendulum. The docs relied on her because her success rate was 99.9%. Early in her career she predicted triplets but helped deliver quadruplets.

I can't give you a scientific explanation for it but I know it hasn't failed me in over 30 years of using that ability in all sorts of situations where dirt was about to be moved, either mechanically or by hand.

I don't have a scientific explanation for musical talents either but I know there are people who can sit at a piano and play without ever having a lesson or having touched a piano before. Same for other musical instruments. It is simply an ability to perform an action in a manner that not all the population can perform. Of my grandmother's thirteen offspring, nine could play any musical instrument they got their hands on. None of them had formal training of any sort but if they could hear a musical piece they could play it back. One either has that ability or doesn't have that ability.

Here's the easiest way to acquire the knowledge you are seeking---just try it. You will then know whether or not you have the ability.

Does water have to be present in the pipe in order to be dowsed? In other words, can you locate empty waterlines and sewer lines?

If there is some kind-of physiological interaction necessary between the dowser and the dowsing rods, wouldn't using straws as sleeves to hold the rods interfere with the effect?

Given the original purpose of water witching, I assume that pipes don't need to be present in order to get an indication. And that presents another factor that makes this experiment difficult to perform for the citizen scientist. How to verify whether a subterranean waterway exists with minimal investment?

Proposed Experiment:
The purpose of this experiment is to determine if there is any measurable effect shared by a large portion of the population as proposed by several participants in this thread. The accuracy of the predictions is a secondary result as it may not be possible to know all potential triggering sources.

1. Secure a test field and grid it off. Grid should be visible to test subject. Test field should have one or more confirmed targets to eliminate a null result. Because accuracy is not of primary importance in this experiment, the exact location of the target is not necessarily needed. The terrain of the test field and adjacent properties should be settled and display no outward indications of subterranean water features.

2. Use remote video monitoring of the test area in order to record individual test subject results. Only the test subject should be on the test field. All other participants and experimenters should be out of sight and hearing range.

3. Assemble a large group of test subjects of various physical builds, beliefs, etc. A large diverse group provides the best possibility for observing a meaningful result, if one exists. For example, skin resistance is postulated to be one attribute that has a bearing on the dowser's results.

4. Instruct the test subjects in the proper method of holding the instruments, posture, walking, etc. This is in an attempt to limit variations in test subject indication so that a somewhat consistent scale can be determined for the group, and minimize the subjective interpretation of the experimenters.

5. Have each individual test subject walk the entire grid. Video monitoring will record any subject indications from multiple angles.

6. Using the video records, determine where each indication occurred. Plot that point on a map of the test field. Several experimenters should view the results and map the test subject indications. This will help to eliminate any subjective bias introduced by individual experimenters.

7. If there is a measurable effect it would manifest in localized point groupings created by some subset of the test population. Because there is at least one known target in the test field, a shared null result would not be a valid indication of grouping.

An easy experiment to perform with a minimum of apparatus. Unfortunately I can't perform this experiment. The apparatus is easy. But I don't have any friends...

-dex

WOW!
I am amazed.

Prior to visiting my parent this afternoon, I straightened two steel coat hangers of equal length and made a 90°bend at the ends of each one for the handles as described previously. On holding them in the way described by TheRedneck they seemed to wander around on their own for no particular reason. I walked around the house a bit, but nothing struck me as unusual. I didn't feel like I was dowsing anything.

My father told me that his father used to do it, but it wasn't something he had been greatly interested in himself. He seemed to know a bit about it though and agreed to giving it a shot so we both went outside into their yard.

I tried it first.
There was a slight breeze and I felt it moving the wire around a little bit. I tried to hold the wire as steady as possible not wanting to influence their movement. What surprised me most was the reaction while walking over the area where we know the mains water pipe is. The rods didn't just cross, I FELT them wanting to cross!

The best way I could describe it was that it felt like a magnetic force acting on the wire, tugging at them. Not knowing the type of metal they were made from, I tested the wire afterwards and yes, it is attracted to magnets. Moving away from that area and they uncrossed and just sort of waved around a bit in the slight breeze.

My Dad tried next and had the same result as I did, which surprised him greatly, he wasn't expecting it to do anything at all and gave it a few test runs to see if the first was a fluke. He also claimed to have felt the magnetic pulling feeling.

Of course further testing like the experiment outlined by DexterRiley would be necessary before any real conclusion could be drawn, but for my own satisfaction, I'm pretty convinced there is definitely something to it.

As both my Father and I seemed to be able to get the reaction from the rods over a water source, The idea that it may have something to do with the electrical output of a person that I suggested in this post is probably wrong.

I'd like to explore this subject further. I wasn't expecting the sort of results we got from our brief, unscientific experiment. Neither was my father.

Here is my shocked father approaching a spot over the water mains as the wires crossed much to his and my surprise.

The wires actually crossed all the way 90° pointing left and right when he was directly over the water mains.

Thank you for making this thread halfoldman.
Very interesting.

Phage, et al.

I am an engineer (too), and like redneck, here's my story...

Not a double blind study, but it was a real world experience.

I was working on a survey crew in UT and we were laying out a piece of property to be developed at the foot of the Wasatch range. A large transite water line bisected the property and it was one of the things we wanted to mark and ID. We even had an as-built engineering drawing of where the line supposedly was. The drawing was of a much larger area and not specific to the roughly 200 acre piece of property we were interested in. We laid out the water line according to what the drawing said and staked it accordingly.

Something didn't seem right. On an two adjacent pieces of property we noticed structures well west of where we had the line located. We pulled the lids and they were indeed valve structures on the line in question, but they weren't lining up with anything we had located via the documents. The line in question was transite so it wasn't metalic and had been installed before they put in locate wires (the fact it was transite pretty much ruled that out) so metal detectors were of no use. Still though, we had some pretty sophisticated survey gear, so we attempted to put a sonar like tone on the water itself (installing tone generating equipment in the manhole directly on the line) and then attempted to surface locate the line from there. We were only able to locate the line roughly 200 feet away from the MH structures, not even close enough to reach the property boundary we were surveying. We tried several other measures, all to no avail. Our confidence level in either of our two staked lines being accurate was very low (like near zero).

As a practical measure we staked a temporary line directly between the two structures we identified (just for reference). The temporary line was as noted well west of the as-built location and the angles were wrong. We tried everything...what to do?

Our crew chief was this old guy and we were standing at the truck lamenting our efforts, after a long while he says..."Well, I guess we could try "witching" it" I'd heard of this before, but just thought it was mythical nonsense. Whatever, I thought, it was worth a shot, nothing else had worked.

He pulls out these two pieces of brass brazing rod, each about two feet long bent into a 90 degree angle at just shy of the halfway point. He goes about his business. After a minute or so it looks like he's found something. So I grab a lath bag, some survey tape and a hammer and go drive a stake. I write "W-1" on the stake (lol, for "witch station 1").

To make an already long (likely boring) story...even longer... This goes on for a while. I drive about 10 more stakes at various locations. The line he's located makes no sense at all, looks like random stakes driven in an empty field. So we try to makes sense out of what he's found. After some 'noodling' on his findings over the drawing for a while, we come up with some possible scenarios. The only way what this guy had found would work is if there were at least two more structures not shown on our drawing. So rather than waste more time we 'gut-check' this by surveying two layout lines at crossing angles. If we can locate one of the missing structures we would know we were onto something. If not, then we were just wasting time.

Sure enough, at the intersection of the two survey lines we get a big metal detector hit. Shovel time! Under about a foot of dirt we find a buried MH cover. I'm thinking to myself "Holy crap, this is kinda' spooky!" In the manhole the line is not running the way we expected, so obviously the line has turned. We repeat the same process at the other end and sure enough we find another buried MH structure.

For whatever reason, the water line made a jog around something (likely a large rock formation) for several thousand feet which wasn't documented on the drawing we had. (Note: We would later find that the drawing we had was the original plan drawing, not the as-built drawing.) Now all the random looking stakes he'd found made sense.

Because the water line would need to be relocated anyway it wasn't long before the developer was on-site with excavator equipment to expose sections of the line. I kid you not, everywhere they dug to expose the line where this guy had located via witching, they found the line! All the other locations we'd marked were way off.

None of us knew where the line was to begin with, and our crew chief (the old guy) wasn't even from UT, so there's no way he could have been around when this line was installed.

Shrug...convinced me.

ETA...I'm sure it goes without saying that no self-respecting "engineering" company would ever provide engineering documentation to an Owner which volunteered the fact that an existing utility had been located using some sort of voo-doo or witchcraft without saying as much. And this is just exactly what our documents said..."Possible location of line using alternative non-traditional, non-scientific, methods".

a reply to: DexterRiley

Does water have to be present in the pipe in order to be dowsed? In other words, can you locate empty waterlines and sewer lines? ...

In my experience, yes.

The process seems to locate water, not pipes. I've not tried it on sewer lines so I can't say how it would work. I have tried it myself (many times since the event noted above). I have noticed that the process works much better on large sources of water, and I would doubt it would work on something as small as say a residential water line.

A lot of guys use this process here in CO to locate sites to drill agricultural or stock wells, and they swear by it.

I've found two underground springs on our property using this method.

Oh, and on an interesting footnote...

I've been fascinated by this process for many years, so I pay attention to any discussion on the subject in an effort to understand the phenomenon better.

One time I was talking with a gal and her husband about it. She is 100% convinced it works, but (and this was really interesting) she says she is completely unable to make it work herself. She also points out that she is only able to wear certain types of jewelry (corrosion), and that digital devices such as watches and phones, if carried on her person, will break down in short order with her...100% of the time. You hear about these symptoms frequently, people being "allergic" to certain metals, etc.

So one of my theories is, it must have something to do with electrochemical phenomenon (some sort of galvanic reaction maybe?). It's an interesting topic to be sure.

a reply to: halfoldman
Oh, it definitely works. I first used the L-shaped wires when I was about 14 and we were looking for an "unmapped" water pipe that was somewhere in our back yard. When the wires crossed over we marked the spot, then Dad had a go and got the same spot. So he then dug down and found the pipe!

Years later in my first marriage, my wife's Dad wanted a bore on his farm so he could grow vegetables for the markets. Most locals said it was a waste of time and money because there was no water around less than about 300 feet deep. However one old farmer said to him, "On the other hand, you could ask the water diviner. He's found plenty."

So he called in the local water diviner, who soon found a spot on the farm that he said had very good water, lots of it, and not too deep. I'm not sure how he worked it all out, but he was known to be right most of the time.

Dad-in-law believed him and called in the bore drilling firm. They set up the rig and only had to go down about 60 feet before they hit a real gusher. Excellent water and measured flow of more than 6,000 GPH. (Gallons per hour.) This was in the middle of a drought year and there were pictures in the local papers of the road below his farm flooded by the water before the drilling crew could stop the gusher and fit the valve gear.

He pumped from that bore for the next 25 years or so, irrigating acres of vegies and watermelons -- which need lots of water. Right up til he retired and sold the property, the bore never failed. I went past there just a couple months ago while in Oz on vacation, and the folks who bought the place from him are still using that bore and growing tons of lettuces, melons, etc.

So, yeah. Some things, while clearly real, just can't be easily explained.

originally posted by: eManym
I experimented with dosing rods. My setup was two wire clothes hangers bent into 'L' shapes. I cut a plastic straw in half and inserted the straws in the short part of the bend so they would move freely. What I discovered was when my hands were moved very slightly downward from the horizonal the dowsing rods would cross. When my hands moved very slightly upward from the horizontal the rods separated. I am not convinced that dowsing works any different from random or chance.

Sounds scientific to me... 🤣 So you have a laser level built into your wrists so you know for a fact you were only raising them up and down on one axis, and your wrists were not rotating inward or outward as you tilted the ride up and down?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
You can sometimes locate fairly local water pipes if they're reasonably shallow. But as you say, I've never been able to find "dead" pipes this way, only ones with water in them.

In your next post, where you talk about people who have trouble with watches and the like, my Grandad was that way. If he wore a mechanical watch (wind-up type) it'd just stop. Eventually he gave up wearing a watch all together. So I bought him a quartz watch and he tried that. It worked fine. Go figure...

Back in my younger days I had a friend in Australia who was the opposite. If you had a wind-up watch that had stopped because it had run down, he could just hold it in the palm of his hand -- no shaking or anything -- and after a few moments it'd start ticking again. He had no idea how he did it, but he'd had this odd ability since he was a little kid.

a reply to: diggindirt

I wonder if it depends on some combination of conditions within the human body? Maybe even the person's PH balance could effect it, who knows?

Have you ever heard of a person "gaining" or "losing" the ability? Like, if they have a cellphone in their pocket maybe it could interfere with the body's natural field?

Also, consider what a human is comprised of. Mostly water. Blood is basically just...water flowing through pipes.

more than h2o....men.....

And gold in the ground can be seen giving vapor rising with a polaroid

copper and brass rods are good too....although a smaller wire sounds cool, i've only used copper and brass

we dig Spanish illegal to keep artifacts on the Red up in the sands near SPANISH FORT TEXAS

kings chairs, sombrero stones and hundreds of blocks with the cross.....Jesus and veras.....which are distance and direction markers.....and

get this ....the blocks have 3/8 inch holes drilled into the corners for rope

a reply to: 3n19m470

Oh you can definitely make the divining rods cross by changing the angle, but you also can feel the rods not being balanced when you do it too. If you just want to make them cross and uncross you can definitely do it intentionally, but that's not really the point.

If you hold them straight so they don't cross and continue this same manner as you move, this is what you want. When the rods cross in this scenario...then you might have found something (water).

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: 3n19m470

Oh you can definitely make the divining rods cross by changing the angle, but you also can feel the rods not being balanced when you do it too. If you just want to make them cross and uncross you can definitely do it intentionally, but that's not really the point.

If you hold them straight so they don't cross and continue this same manner as you move, this is what you want. When the rods cross in this scenario...then you might have found something (water).

In our attempt at it today, I noticed that you could make the rods cross if you wanted to with subtle hand movements.
That wasn't the point of my test though. I tried to keep them as still as possible on purpose. If it was going to work, I wanted to see it work. What impressed me was that while over my parents water main the rods didn't just cross, there was a noticeable magnetic attraction type of feel to the rods when they crossed. Almost spooky.

a reply to: Hammaraxx

Without reading any farther, I want to thank you for doing this and reporting back. Your experience sounded almost identical to mine, with the exception of 'feeling' the force. That's not unusual for me, though... I have had a hard life and have been described as "numb from the head down." Made for a lot of fun when I tried a Ju Jitsu class once, but that's another story.

The wires certainly seemed to have a will when they activated. That's for sure. In my experience, the force with which they crossed seemed to be proportional to the amount/proximity of the water, too.

I am really getting excited about seeing a scientific study done. I hope Phage comes through on that.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

Thanks buddy.
I really want to thank you too.

Your posts and advice was great inspiration to do this with my father today and I think we both enjoyed a bit of time wandering around the yard together. It was fun to see my normally reserved father get into a bit of "woo-woo" and the look on his face when the wires crossed was pure gold to see. He tried it quite a few times in order to see if it was a fluke, then he seemed genuinely proud that the wires crossed each time he crossed the pipes.

I know what we did wasn't a scientifically sound experiment. It was good enough for us though, we felt it, we know.
To me, that's all that matters.

Youtube has it........an old expert very quickly places flaggs

i didn't want to post this but the reply up there asking about other objects for search or if the searcher can input another subject for discovery....yes...but let's keep the thread simple