Water Witching

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

OK, folks. I’ll post the other side, and see if you can explain it away. I learned that I could water witch, but have only done it a couple of times for finding underground streams, not pipes of water. My father taught me how to do it, as the well driller had done it on our property when I was a child. For me, it has to be a fresh cut forked branch (preferrably from a plant that grows near water), and it just gets heavy when I cross water. The heavier it gets the stronger the source. It doesn’t bob or weave or quiver or anything dramatic.

As an adult, a neighbor complained of not having enough water from their well to run their house, so for a kick I cut a fresh branch and checked it out by walking back and forth across his property on the uphill side (near the existing well). I felt a weak pull in direct line with his existing well (uphill from any pipes from the well to the house). 10 feet away from that, parallel to the weak stream, I felt a much stronger pull. They subsequently had a well drilled on the new stream and got plenty of water.

I do believe geologists can accomplish the same thing with a lot of scientific equipment, but that doesn’t mean that the old ways don’t work for some people. But some of it can be hogwash for the gullible. The proof is when it really works for drilling a well. Ask the old timer well drillers.

22

To evnln:
It seems that the only evidence for dowsing is anecdotal evidence like you present here.
And, again, a person would have to be there to see what you did and how you did it before they could make a judgment. (And even then you’d probably have to have specialists in several fields-- geology, psychology, magic, etc.-- to probably explain what happened.)
It’s so easy to fall into the “magical thinking” trap. I know. I’ve been there.

I suggest you read the section about dowsing (water witching) in the Skeptic’s Dictionary.
And, once again, I ask why it is that people insist in believing in nonsense.
It’s endemic throughout the country and, in fact, throughout the world.
We seem to be at it’s mercy and it’s doing serious damage to us.
I wonder if it’s a genetic thing-- something that was necessary for survival at sometime in the distant past and has carried over into our era.
Whatever it is, it’s deluding us and causing serious social problems.

23

In many (most?) places you can drill anywhere and get water. You haven’t proven anything, alas. It’s the classic case of anecdote != data.

24

Explain what? You’re just telling tall tales; anyone can do that. You haven’t given us any good evidence or passed the challenge yet. Up until that point, it’s pure bullshit.

Start here, and good luck!

25

I tested it a few times when I had an aluminium ‘rod’ I liked and then I lost it. It went down where I expected drains to be around but wasn’t sure where they were, but much more disturbingly shot straight up along the middle of a road leading to a church that must only be 100 years old or so.

26

Their other well demonstrates that their house was above an acquifer. Contrary to popular notions, underground water does not usually exist in narrow streams but in very broad acquifers, covering large areas. You couldn’t have failed to hit water if you had tried. The dowsing you did was irrelevant.

Read this information from the US Geological Survey to get a better idea of the reality of underground water. The key to it, and I quote, is this line:

27

Well, it proved it to me, so I guess you’d have to have been there.

And You’re wrong. You can’t just drill anywhere and get enough water to more than supply a household. Getting enough to provide a trickle, well that’s what they had before I found a better stream.

28

What was irrelevant about drilling a new well and getting many times the flow of water?

29

Isn’t the new well with lots more water evidence. Should I have the family submit an notarized record to that fact? What proof do you need to counteract unbelief?

I do believe a lot is tall tale telling. I was trying to provide some proof. I don’t lie.

30

To quote your linked US Geological Survey page, In contrast to the unsaturated zone, the voids in the saturated zone are completely filled with water. The approximate upper surface of the saturated zone is referred to as the water table. Water in the saturated zone below the water table is referred to as ground water. Below the water table, the water pressure is high enough to allow water to enter a well as the water level in the well is lowered by pumping, thus permitting ground water to be withdrawn for use.

Did you get the bold part. There is only water where there are holes in the surrounding dirt and rock. We aren’t floating on solid water down there, like the picture seems to hint at. Digging a large hole down that far will fill with water, but hitting a steady stream of fresh water is what modern wells are aimed at, not muddy holes you dip from with a bucket.

31

Well, I’m not saying it’s magic. I never did. I think it is something genetic that some people can do, just like my memory and navigation skills that were handed down from generations of Vikings who sailed the North Sea until about 4 generations back. I think it’s a skill some people have, not magic some people can do.

32

No it isn’t. The new well could have been deeper. The old well could have been clogged up. You could have got lucky. You didn’t drill all over the place: you have no idea if a dozen other wells all around the area would have got just as good results.

This is one of the basic errors of logic that people make on this subject: private individuals assume their dowsing did something because they drill and hit good water. Many people have completely wrongheaded ideas about the nature of groundwater (see your comment on “underground streams”) and don’t understand that it exists in broad acquifers, so reach the logical conclusion that they cannot have hit water by accident, and their dowsing must have been effective.

But the thing is that drilling for wells is expensive so people understandably stop there: they don’t go on and drill a whole series of other random wells where their dowsing did not indicate they should dig, in order to check the null hypothesis. That’s where organisations (like the US Geological Survey) come in: they have actually studied the subject widely and they say that ground water is almost everywhere. Here’s another one from the Department of Natural Resources in Missouri

Finally, your comments about the nature of acquifers just seem to be evidence of head-burying: even the part you quote talks of pressures below the top of the water table being large enough for water to fill the well as it is pumped.

33

Perhaps you don’t understand the nature of scientific proof. Science is not a collection of anecdotes. Science doesn’t just take the word of someone, and notarizing something doesn’t make it any more true. I could write a statement that I can make gold nuggets fly out of my ass and a notary public could sign it (the notarization doesn’t verify the claim, it just says you are who you say you are). Would that make my claim true? Would that be enough to rewrite the science books?

You may not lie about what you did, observed or how you interpreted it. But you didn’t prove that you could find something with a forked stick or pendulum under scientific, controlled conditions where chance and fraud are ruled out.

You also need to understand cause and effect and the post hoc fallacy.

When clock A strikes, so does clock B. Obviously A caused B, right?

So you dowsed for water and found water in an area where water abounds. How do you know one caused the other?

Take the Challenge. If you pass, we will believe you. Until then, we have reason to doubt. What have you got to lose? Apply today!

34

evnln, I once saw a man carrying a large and heavy telephone pole down the street, and asked him why.

“To keep the elephants away.”

“Ha! There are no elephants here!”

“See? It works!”

35

Because you don’t know that if you drilled anywhere you might have also gotten many times the flow of water. You don’t have enough evidence to draw any conclusions.

36

evnln said:

And we’re just supposed to take your word for that? We don’t even know you.

But even if you don’t lie, that is only one possible source of error. The goal of scientific testing is to remove all sources of error. Remove the possibility of lying and fraud, so that we don’t have to just take your word (or anyone’s word). Remove other sources of error, like misattribution (assigning cause to the wrong thing), misinterpretation, confirmation bias, failure to collect enough data, failure to eliminate other possible explanations, etc. Ensure repeatability - if we do it the same way, we get the same result.

So what if it is a skill, a talent, an inherent ability that people have at differing levels? Well, scientific testing will let those who think they have that skill demonstrate it at the level of performance that they claim to have. If you think you have a 70% success rate, then good testing will have to allow for some amount of error on your part, and not assume you will be 100% successful. That’s part of establishing a test protocol - determining what level of performance is rated a success, and then devising the test such that statistical methods can be reliable.

37

I, too was a scoffer. I couldn’t imagine how dowsing works and still don’t know how. An old farmer named Herb told me it was a gift, and didn’t mind demonstrating any time to anyone. He would cut a forked limb off a willow tree (peach worked also) and stand still, turning in a 360 until it moved, and walk in that direction. The closer he got to “a vein” the lower the limb would point, until it pointed straight down. Then he announced “water here”.
The same willow branch would not do anything in my hands until Herb put his hand on the back of my neck, and then I would almost rip the skin off my fingers. It’s hard to be a smart-alec when that happens. Kinda makes you shutup and listen.
Herb could also find a half dollar thrown out in a wheat field by cutting a notch in the end of the “rod” and inserting a dime. Silver money of course.

38

To evnln:

You said:

“Well, I’m not saying it’s magic. I never did. I think it is something genetic that some people can do, just like my memory and navigation skills that were handed down from generations of Vikings who sailed the North Sea until about 4 generations back. I think it’s a skill some people have, not magic some people can do.”

You completely missed my point.
When I say “magical thinking,” I don’t mean that dowsing works by “magic” or that you are “magical.”
Magical Thinking means that a person, instead of explaining an event like “water witching” rationally, using critical thinking skills and good scientific protocol, assigns the event a paranormal cause that they think lies outside the realm of established physics. This term could apply to “dowsing” or “remote viewing,” or a thousand other events where the believers claim that what is happening has no other explanation except some cause unknown or undetectable by science.
“Psychic” abilities or astrology would be good examples of magical thinking.
These paranormal beliefs are held to be true by millions, but when tested using established scientific techniques, they are shown to be nonsense.

And that’s the second point you missed:
I didn’t say that being able to dowse a well might be an inherited ability. Far from it. I said that there might be a genetic factor that makes us believe in magical thinking, some inherited characteristic in our far our distant past that made this sort of delusion useful for survival. How else can you explain the degree to which magical thinking is so common in today’s world?
You claim: “my memory and navigation skills …were handed down from generations of Vikings”
Possibly yes; probably no.
Does being of Viking heritage make a person more skillful than others in navigation? There were, and still are, a lot of explorers who weren’t Vikings.

In 1969 a major study of UFO reports was conducted by the University of Colorado headed by Dr. Edward Condon, a Noble laureate.
The conclusion of this report (“Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects”, p. 810) stated that there was no acceptable scientific evidence that any UFOs were of extraterrestrial alien-life origin and that any future investigation along this line of research would be a waste of time, effort, and money. The conclusion further states that future research on this might be done better in the hands of social scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc., “as a source of information on psychological and social-psychological problems of perception, reporting, etc.”
This exhaustive investigation was immediately condemned by UFO alien-life believers in just about every manner imaginable, from “government cover-up” to “Condon is, himself, an alien.”
This irrational belief in UFOs persists as strong today as it ever was, with TV shows, movies, and media accounts presenting alien UFOs as fact, not fiction. There are UFO conventions being held all over the world. These believers constantly demand “The Truth’” which really means they won’t be satisfied with anything less than a government statement telling the world that these deluded people are right: there really are aliens walking among us.
In spite of all evidence to the contrary, anything less than a total validation of their fanatical beliefs is totally unacceptable to them.

Why do people insist on believing things without any evidence and, in many cases, believing in things contrary to all scientific evidence?

This seems to describe you, evnln, and the others who have posted supporting dowsing as being valid.
“My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”

And now I suspect there will be those who will post here attacking everything I just said.
As a former science teacher, all I can say is: Your science teachers failed you.

39

And you think this proved anything? Did you actually drill for water there and verify it? Did you drill for water in places he didn’t signal and see if you found water there? Seriously, there’s nothing here to even bother debunking, since there’s nothing that’s been bunked. Even if you did drill for water, most populated places in the US you can drill anywhere and strike water.

On the contrary, it makes me want to speak out about the mistakes in your logic. :slight_smile: What you described is mere suggestibility and the ideomotor effect. There’s nothing here we haven’t heard dozens of times and always proves to be less than described when examined in detail.

As to the silver dollar thing, it’s hard to debunk from a anecdote but I can think of a dozen ways for that to appear to be happening without any need to resort to divining. Every (and I mean EVERY) scientific test of the phenomenon has shown that it’s hooey. With subjecting this to any rigorous testing these anecdotes aren’t worth much. They have always proven to be untrue, misleading, or simply hoaxes and I suspect they’ll continue to be.

40

Isn’t it great that Google Ads is serving up so many fine ads for dowsing equipment on this thread? :slight_smile: