UK water company staff are dumping their hi-tech gadgets and using ancient water magic instead

They are using sticks or metal rods to find water pipes and leaks

And no-one can explain how this works!

You may never have heard of dowsing or water divining. People who do water dowsing can walk across land and find underground streams, pools and even leaks in water pipes – and all they need is a stick or two metal rods.

This ancient magic art was used to find water to drink or to irrigate crops and has been used in Europe for thousands of years. And yet science cannot explain how it works – but dowsing has been proven to work repeatedly!

And now a survey of British water utility companies has revealed the astonishing truth that water company staff are throwing away their hi-tech water detection and pipe detection gadgets, and using water dowsing instead. In fact, whenever they need to find water underground, or even inside walls of homes, they turn to this ancient magic rather than technology.

HOW DOES A DOWSER FIND WATER?

Traditional water dowers used a twig shaped like the English letter V. They would gently hold one part of the twig in each hand, with the single twig end pointing in front of them.

The water dowser would then walk across the ground in the area where they wanted to find water or the pipe. They would walk slowly and keep holding the twig softly in their hands. Then, when they reached a place where there was underground water, the pointed end of the twig would move up and down. Magically the dowser would find the water every time!

The earliest written references to dowsing were in German books from 700 years ago, where it was being used to find metal ores that could be mined. And dowsing can also be very good for finding metal objects too – not just minerals, but lost jewellery, metal pipes and even electric cables.

Although the written records of dowsing go back 700 years, many dowsers believe that it is a truly ancient art. It has always been most commonly used in areas of Europe where Celtic peoples lived, in Britain and Ireland, and in the original Celtic homelands in modern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The Celts were strong believers in the magical properties of water and of trees, so finding water with a stick would make perfect sense to a Celtic Druid or shaman.

And dowsing has even been used by the military. In the 1960s, US troops used dowsing in Vietnam to find tunnels and arms caches, and in 1986, the Norwegian military used dowsing to try to find the bodies of 31 soldiers lost in an avalanche.

NOT JUST STICKS

Modern dowsers usually use two metal rods instead of a twig, because twigs seem to lose their vitality as they dry out. Usually the two rods are the shape of the English letter L, and the short parts of the rod are often put into tubes that are then held in the hands, so that they can move freely. When the rods find the water or metal they are looking for, they move towards each other.

Other dowsers have used plastic rods or even a pendulum, where the pendulum swing changes as it finds the object it is searching for.

HOW DOES DOWSING WORK?

No-one knows how to explain it scientifically. It does seem to be important that the dowser has a clear mind, and is almost in a state of meditation. Some people think that what happens is that the metal being searched for, or the flowing water, creates a small magnetic field that affects the water in the twig or the metal rods. But this would not explain how plastic rods can be used, so this explanation seems to be wrong.

Other people think that there is a magnetic field, but it is not the dowsing rods that detects it – it is the dowser himself! It is well known now that the human brain is affected by even quite small magnetic fields, and so the theory here is that the dowser is subconsciously “feeling” the magnetic field created by the water or metal, and then subconsciously move their hands so that the rod moves, and they can then consciously know the target has been found.

Of course, conventional scientists have not found an answer and so they dismiss dowsing as a pseudoscience. But dowsing works far better than any science for the water engineers of the British water companies, and that is the best proof that scientists are wrong!