| In
the search for water, minerals, and many other things, there is nothing quite
as controversial as the practice of dowsing, whether it be with a forked willow
or peach switch, the 'Spanish rods,' or any number of other devices. There are
two things you can say for certain about dowsing. First, it works. Second, nobody
knows for sure how or why it works.
Historically, dowsing has been with
us a long time. In DE RE METALLICA, a 16th century treatise on mining and metallurgy,
the author, Georgius Agricola, a German monk, explains that dowsing works-but
no one knows why. In this, the first known printed description of the practice,
Agricola notes that the practice dates from antiquity. He apparently does not
consider it supernatural. He does not attach a 'witchcraft' stigma to it. My
first experience with dowsing came in the early 1960s. My father wanted a new
well on the home place, up on a ridge in the pasture. There was and is water under
the place. If you drill deep enough in that part of western Williamson County
you will drill into the Trinity Sands aquifer. Trinity Sands has excellent water,
but with a high sulfur content. The sulfur content makes it smell and taste slightly
of sulfur-it's almost a 'rotten egg' smell, but faint. If you drink it regularly
the sulfur in your body's fluids wards off things like ticks, fleas, mosquitoes,
and biting flies.
The dowser, an old man who used a forked peach switch,
told us there was water there- something we already knew. He said "'Bout a hundred
foot down you're gonna hit water. Drill on past it. Ain't much water there an'
the well'll go dry on you. The good water's 'bout six, seven hundred foot down.
There's something atween you an' 'at water, though, an' I'm gonna try an' find
out what it is. It pulls mighty funny."
He 'baited the switch' with a
silver dime and got no reaction. "'Tain't silver," he said. "Let's try gold."
He 'baited the switch again, this time with a gold ring. There was no reaction.
"'Tain't gold, neither. I'm gonna try oil." He took out a small bottle of crude
oil, tied it to the end of the switch, and tried that. "It's something sorta kin
to oil, but it ain't oil. You oughta hit it 'bout three hundred foot down." At
approximately 100 feet the bore hit water, as the dowser said it would, but-knowing
the Trinity Sands aquifer was much deeper, drilling continued. At about 300 feet
into the bore the bit struck a pocket of natural gas under enough pressure to
lift some five feet of drill rod and casing out of the hole.
Nevertheless,
I remained a skeptic of the "Yeah, sure" variety until I got an awakening in the
spring of 1980 in McCulloch County. I discovered I can dowse. Since that time
I've found that a lot of people have the 'power' to dowse, and have become convinced
that there is no special 'power' involved. Instead, I am convinced that there
is a physical principle that isn't yet understood, and that principle is in some
way electrical in nature.
I use what are called 'Spanish rods.' You can
buy these things for a small fortune from ads in treasure-hunting magazines, or
you can do what I did. You can go to a hardware store, buy 2 pieces of solid-core
copper wire about a yard long each, strip the insulation, and bend them in the
shape of an L, with about 6" of the L forming the handhold. For that matter, you
can use what the US Marines used in Viet Nam to locate VC and NVA tunnels-two
pieces of coathanger wire.
When I started showing that I could dowse,
I got all sorts of 'advice' about the care and feeding of my rods. "You have to
wrap them in silk," I was told, "and sleep with them under your pillow for nine
nights, or you'll lose the power." When I finish dowsing I roll the wires up,
wrap them in a cotton bandana to keep them from poking holes in my jeans or my
backside, and stick them in a hip pocket. The wires don't seem to mind, even if
I've wiped sweat or blown my nose on the bandana. I store them, usually, in the
glove compartment of whatever vehicle I'm driving at the time. I've never slept
with them and I've never touched them with anything made of silk.
Apparently
what the wires detect, acting as an antenna of some sort, is differences in density.
If I am standing on a concrete sidewalk the wires will cross over a steel reinforcing
rod or an iron pipe embedded in or under the concrete. If I am standing on dirt,
they will cross when I bring them over something more dense. That can be buried
metal, very dense rock like granite, flint, chert, or agate, or even a tightly-packed
game trail. If I bring them above an area less dense than what I am standing on,
such as an underground void like a tunnel or natural cave, they will open instead
of crossing and point down the axis of the void. If there is a turn in the void,
the wires will indicate the direction in which the void turns.
It was
this the Marines used to great effect in Viet Nam. The Army's Corps of Engineers
brought in a seismic tunnel locator, which involved boring holes in the ground,
setting charges in the holes, and measuring the ground echoes from the blasts
to determine the location of tunnels. The instrument, which cost about half a
million dollars, was about 50% effective in locating tunnels, but could not map
them from the surface. The Marines' coathanger wires were 95% effective in locating
tunnels, and could map them from the surface by indicating subterranean turns.
Several
years ago a good friend, the late Dr. I. Waynne* Cox, an archaeologist at UTSA,
decided to test my dowsing skills. At the time the former Joske's Department Store
parking lot in downtown San Antonio was to be removed for the construction of
a major shopping mall. Under the asphalt there had been, in the mid to late 19th
and early 20th centuries, a middle-class, mostly German neighborhood. The German
houses were usually built of stone and had basements. Dr. Cox's task was to locate
as many foundations as possible and do salvage archaeology before the new mall
was built. He had Sanborn's insurance maps of the area. It had also been gone
over with a metal detector and the sites of the strikes marked.
My wires
picked up the strikes, of course, just as I knew they would. The metal detector,
however, wouldn't pick up foundation stones. I was not told where the foundations
were, nor did I see the map. The wires confirmed the locations of a dozen or so
houses under the asphalt, exactly where the map said they should be. There was,
however, a discrepancy in the map. A house of particular interest wasn't where
the map said it was. When the area was opened with a backhoe, nothing was found.
My wires picked up the foundations about 10 feet from where the map said they
should be-and then picked up a circular feature at the southeast corner of the
foundation. No circular feature appeared on the Sanborn's map.
The circular
feature, on excavation, was found to be the limestone coping of a stone-lined,
ground-level cistern. The existence of the cistern, which turned out to be filled
with 19th and early 20th century trash-a treasure-trove to archaeologists-was
previously unknown and probably would have been missed entirely, since the primary
purpose of the dig was to confirm the house's location and clear its basement
of debris. That could have been done by locating two corners of the foundation.
The basement would have been excavated. Unless the cistern was discovered by accident
it would have gone unexcavated.
My experience with the wires indicates
there must be some conductive contact between the wires themselves and the person
holding them. When I placed the short ends of the wires in pieces of aluminum
tubing they worked as well as if I had them in my hands alone. However, when I
placed the short ends in the necks of glass bottles and held the bottles, the
wires did not react, even at locations that had previously registered anomalies
in density.
Do I know how they work? No. Do I have some special 'power'
that makes them work? No. The wires function, I am convinced, upon a physical,
not a psychic, principle-a principle of which we are not currently aware. Should
the principle be investigated scientifically? Why? It certainly could be, but
is there a need for it? The wires work. That's enough for me. |
