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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedDowsing expectations: new reports reawaken scientific controversy over water witching - location of water or objects beneath the earth by the use of metal or wooden rods - Cover Story
Science News, August 5, 1995 by Janet Raloff
That report has stirred the curiosity of many scientists who have regarded divining as parlor trickery or subconsciously prompted muscle movements. Betz, several said, is notable for appearing honest, "not flaky," and anxious to study the phenomenon seriously.
For this reason alone, concedes physicist Leonard Finegold of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Betz' report on dowsing has to be taken seriously. However, Betz has failed to convince him or many other skeptics that dowsing is real.
over the years, many studies have purported to prove that dowsers could find buried or out-of-sight objects. But invariably, says University of Oregon psychologist Ray Hyman--who coauthored Water Witching U.S.A. (1979, University of Chicago Press), an oft-cited book on water dowsing--those studies were flawed or the performance of dowsers proved no better than chance.
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And Hyman argues that both the design of Betz' tests and the absence of adequate comparison data flaw most of the physicist's analyses.
Take Betz' accounts of Hans Schroter, a civil and sanitary engineer employed by the German government. Schroter has spent much of his career prospecting for potable water in developing countries as part of a German technical assistance program. The first part of Betz' new report, running 43 pages in the spring Journal of Scientific Exploration, describes Schroter's water dowsing in 10 developing countries.
In Sri Lanka, for instance, Betz reports that only 27 of the 691 well sites that Schroter dowsed came up "dry"--that is, yielded too little water or water with unacceptable amounts of salt or minerals. "No prospecting area with comparable subsoil conditions is known where such outstanding results have ever been attained," Betz states.
Even if true, Hyman argues, that statement is unscientific. Betz not only offered few comparisons to nondivined sites in the same region, Hyman says, he failed to articulate which soil conditions he was referring to, or even to prove that Schroter divined his sites.
Hyman is more impressed by a smaller comparison of Schroter's success in one Sri Lanka locale. A conventional drilling company sank 14 wells there, hoping to produce at least 100 liters of water per minute from each. Only three surpassed that rate; nine fell below 50 liters per minute. By contrast, Betz reports, Schroter "divined" seven sites, six of which yielded 150 liters per minute or more.
Even hydrogeologist Jay Lehr, former head of the National Ground Water Association in Dublin, Ohio, concedes that "Schroter would be a terrific asset to any company trying to locate water."
But "that his skill comes from a force field that his body can intercept and interpret is patently absurd," Lehr says. "People with such a high success at dowsing invariably have an understanding, whether they're aware of it or not, of various surface cues that increase one's chance of finding water."
Betz acknowledges that Schroter's experience in water prospecting and cooperation with drilling companies render him the equivalent of a geologist. As such, Hyman observes, Schroter may cue into geology--albeit unconsciously--during his dowsing.
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