My awareness of anything allegedly serious to do with dowsing came from an unexpected source. While teaching college science, my best friend was/is one of those rare professors whose brains were actually impressive. He was and is the most analytically bright guy I have come across. He reminds me of my "distant" buddy, Henry Bauer, in more than one way. Not only are they dazzlingly sharp, and
very tough sells on anything paranormal [they smile benignly at me when I talk about these things, doubtlessly thinking "well, it's mostly harmless" and let my "enthusiasms" go], but they also each have ONE [count 'em, one] anomalistic thing that they absolutely believe to be real. Henry's is, of course, the Loch Ness Monster. [I'll give my friend a pseudonym, he doesn't need the publicity] "Bill" believes in dowsing. I was stunned when he told me the first time. No funny-stuff, Physics-trained, super-analytical Bill was sure that dowsing was real. The irony was that I was pretty sure, at the time, that it
wasn't. He would loan me his copper rods and tell me tales of success [dating back to when he would follow his father around finding breaks in underground electrical conduits]. I tried them. It became obvious to me that I could make them do anything that I wanted them to do, cross, stay straight, swing wide, regardless of the surroundings---just by the tiniest of movements. [I admit that I wasn't in the right frame of mind for any real test, but it still showed me that dangers lurked in this business]. Bill said that the rods would cross when you walked them close to a person, as if "sensing" some "field" [he, the physicist, wanted this to be a "normal" energy field]. I told him that I could walk right through that "field" and proceeded to do so--the rods remaining parallel right past both his ears. Hmmm...that seemed to surprise him, but did not severely dampen the theory--my manipulative force was overpowering the field involved. Surely if we could devise a test blindfolded, we'd see the truth. Not wanting to poke anyone's eyes out, our speculations stopped there. Now and then he'd tell me of some new experience he'd had with the rods, and, because it was him, I knew that he was telling me exactly as it had happened. More on the strangest of these later.
My next encounter with dowsing came when I treated myself, somewhat guiltily [I
am a Catholic afterall] to a wonderful adventure called
Magickal Britain. This was a tour to the ancient sites [megalithic and Arthurian] in the west of Britain and Scotland. If Jamie George is still running these things, do yourself a favor and explore. Most of the stuff was magickal All-The-Way-Fool but a bit of it was Out Proctor or worse. The relevant point to dowsing happened at Avebury Circle. Here many of the tour companies apparently arrange for a dowser to show up and lecture the Americans about dowsing, Earth Energies, and the "fact" that you could detect them right in the Circle. {about half the people on my tour already believed this by the way}. The three single guys on the tour stood and watched the guide cleverly manipulate the excited tourists [wanting to participate in a bit of mystery] by suddenly saying something just at the moments that they crossed the line between standing stones, and the rods would obediently cross. I kid you not; he did it
every time. Jamie came over to us and asked "why don't you guys think there's anything to this?" I tried to explain what I thought was going on, but one of my new-found friends, Richard Bull, took the issue by the horns. The guide was explaining how the stone's energy would turn away the rods [like the face was supposed to, earlier] and asked for volunteers to demonstrate this. Richard immediately volunteered. I said "Dick, don't do this to them.", but with a bit a devilry he took the rods. While the dowser was trying to program him with what was about to happen, and saying so with increasing volume as Dick approached, Dick stuck the parallel tips of the rods right into the face of the stone [just as I knew he would]. I don't remember how the guy tried to save this situation, so I won't make something up. But it was an awkwardness that didn't really need to have occurred. As Henry and Bill say about me: it's not doing any harm. These anecdotes are mentioned not to claim much of anything. They only point out that if you don't want to go along with the game, the forces involved are not strong enough to overrule you. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But there are people who believe that if you're in the right state-of-mind at the right place at the right moment, the forces involved can be very strong indeed. In one of John Mullins' cases, mentioned in the last post, the rod tore itself away so strongly that it broke itself. Regarding the megaliths, a person who believed that the powers were real and easily sensible was John Williams of Abergavenny Wales. Williams is apparently known by British insiders in the Ley Line/ Earth Energies community but not much elsewhere [and I gather not even that much overseas--he may becoming a bit of a forgotten man]. I, of course, wouldn't have had a clue if a rough draft of an incomplete manuscript hadn't come into my hands. Entitled "In Search of King Arthur" and dated confusingly, sometimes 1965 and sometimes 1980, it
is in an unexpected way about Arthur, but is largely about Stones and energies associated with them. Williams' discovery is of "bands" of energy of different types and potencies which exist at different levels above and below the Earth. I. obviously, have no way of knowing if any of this is true. As Williams goes far beyond this to imagine great, almost-"grids" of energies casting across the landscape, and serving as the Earth's template for the ancients' placement of megaliths country-wide, the concept goes entirely beyond my data, and starts sounding as the potential land use plan for Out Proctor. Williams has, of course, dowsed all this, mostly using a pendulum. As you read his draft, you get the impression of an intelligently sane man who has, he feels, plenty of empirical data for what he is writing. He also tells a story of a British film crew coming out to film his ideas at the locations of the stones. After telling the crew about one of the more powerful energy bands, one of them wanted to "try it". Cameras rolling, she placed her hands on the appropriate "band" and immediately was turned and pushed to the side. Everyone in the crew laughed at this, while Williams was staggered by their casual amusement at the filming of a phenomenon entirely unrecognized by conventional science. The extent of the ignorance and jadedness of the media has no limit.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Williams got paid the massive sum of 20pounds for his trouble, and, as far as he could tell, the film was only shown as part of a mysteries series on Welsh TV. They had shot the phenomenon of the girl being pushed from the stone more than once--once in slow motion with Williams himself, as they wanted to show the directional nature of the force exerted. That's when things got noticeably Out Proctor. Here's the quote [the filmers were concentrating on the action and didn't notice this until they got the show ready for the air.] "On 27th September 1979 I was surprised when Brynmore Williams telephoned me in my office from London and told me that the part of the film taken in slow motion on 16th July 1976 showed an object appearing from a cloud and disappearing behind the prehistoric standing stone just as I was being thrown away from the top of the standing stone with my hands and fingers outstretched above my head. The speed of the object had been calculated by a mathematician in the BBC studios as the incredible speed of 16000 miles per hour" [incredible indeed as there is no way to do such a calculation when you don't have a means of knowing the distance--trust me, I'm a doctor]. Although the speed was a bogus calculation, and not Williams' fault, we can probably accept that some pale yellow oval UFO raced quickly across the sky coincidentally with his Earth energy experiment. Whether we pay any attention to that or not, Williams did. He wondered if he may have discovered a way to contact "another kind of world which is just outside the range of our five normal senses". You can read such in the handwriting to the left. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe we don't like to mix dowsing with UFOs. Some would; some wouldn't. The "Ley Hunters" [I'd define this for you if any universally agreed-upon definition existed] seem to take a creative stand about this: "UFOs" exist but they are some sort of manifestation of these Earth mysteries that we're generally talking about here. Paul Devereux [see the insert on the magazine cover] is the former talented and imaginative editor of the, also-former Ley Hunter magazine. Paul became a relentless debunker of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs, though a thoughtful and civilized one [this is something that you cannot say for all such folks, particularly those from "across-the-pond"]. Paul was certain that the ETH did not work for UFOs. I don't know what he felt about ideas like Williams' but I imagine that there was some sympathy there. The particular issue of the LH shown, by the way, contains a major [and concerned] message by Tom Graves distressed over the inability of the big thinkers in the Ley field to be able to come to agreement on almost anything that they had been talking about---shades of UFOlogy. Many dowsers would happily just leave larger concepts like Leys alone and concentrate on the microproblems of what dowsing can or can not do on the site. There have been several archaeologists for instance who have shocked their colleagues by admitting [once their reputations had been established] that the secret to their success in locating buried sites/structures was dowsing. CSICOP no doubt crapped their cumulative pants. I'm going to end by going back to my friend "Bill". He came to me, just a year ago, and admitted that he experienced something with the dowsing rod that boggled him--this is one of the most un-boggleable persons on the planet. As part of his interests in genealogy, he was looking up gravestone markers in a New England cemetery. As he really
does have a bit of the adventurer in him--despite no Irish blood, alas--he had taken along his dowsing rods. The rods behaved differently over some graves than others. Was there any pattern? Yes. Being who he is, he saw it after many tries. The rods moved differently over a
male grave than they did over a
female one. WHOA! I just went Out Proctor.
My awareness of anything allegedly serious to do with dowsing came from an unexpected source. While teaching college science, my best friend was/is one of those rare professors whose brains were actually impressive. He was and is the most analytically bright guy I have come across. He reminds me of my "distant" buddy, Henry Bauer, in more than one way. Not only are they dazzlingly sharp, and very tough sells on anything paranormal [they smile benignly at me when I talk about these things, doubtlessly thinking "well, it's mostly harmless" and let my "enthusiasms" go], but they also each have ONE [count 'em, one] anomalistic thing that they absolutely believe to be real. Henry's is, of course, the Loch Ness Monster. [I'll give my friend a pseudonym, he doesn't need the publicity] "Bill" believes in dowsing. I was stunned when he told me the first time. No funny-stuff, Physics-trained, super-analytical Bill was sure that dowsing was real. The irony was that I was pretty sure, at the time, that it wasn't. He would loan me his copper rods and tell me tales of success [dating back to when he would follow his father around finding breaks in underground electrical conduits]. I tried them. It became obvious to me that I could make them do anything that I wanted them to do, cross, stay straight, swing wide, regardless of the surroundings---just by the tiniest of movements. [I admit that I wasn't in the right frame of mind for any real test, but it still showed me that dangers lurked in this business]. Bill said that the rods would cross when you walked them close to a person, as if "sensing" some "field" [he, the physicist, wanted this to be a "normal" energy field]. I told him that I could walk right through that "field" and proceeded to do so--the rods remaining parallel right past both his ears. Hmmm...that seemed to surprise him, but did not severely dampen the theory--my manipulative force was overpowering the field involved. Surely if we could devise a test blindfolded, we'd see the truth. Not wanting to poke anyone's eyes out, our speculations stopped there. Now and then he'd tell me of some new experience he'd had with the rods, and, because it was him, I knew that he was telling me exactly as it had happened. More on the strangest of these later.
My next encounter with dowsing came when I treated myself, somewhat guiltily [I am a Catholic afterall] to a wonderful adventure called Magickal Britain. This was a tour to the ancient sites [megalithic and Arthurian] in the west of Britain and Scotland. If Jamie George is still running these things, do yourself a favor and explore. Most of the stuff was magickal All-The-Way-Fool but a bit of it was Out Proctor or worse. The relevant point to dowsing happened at Avebury Circle. Here many of the tour companies apparently arrange for a dowser to show up and lecture the Americans about dowsing, Earth Energies, and the "fact" that you could detect them right in the Circle. {about half the people on my tour already believed this by the way}. The three single guys on the tour stood and watched the guide cleverly manipulate the excited tourists [wanting to participate in a bit of mystery] by suddenly saying something just at the moments that they crossed the line between standing stones, and the rods would obediently cross. I kid you not; he did it every time. Jamie came over to us and asked "why don't you guys think there's anything to this?" I tried to explain what I thought was going on, but one of my new-found friends, Richard Bull, took the issue by the horns. The guide was explaining how the stone's energy would turn away the rods [like the face was supposed to, earlier] and asked for volunteers to demonstrate this. Richard immediately volunteered. I said "Dick, don't do this to them.", but with a bit a devilry he took the rods. While the dowser was trying to program him with what was about to happen, and saying so with increasing volume as Dick approached, Dick stuck the parallel tips of the rods right into the face of the stone [just as I knew he would]. I don't remember how the guy tried to save this situation, so I won't make something up. But it was an awkwardness that didn't really need to have occurred. As Henry and Bill say about me: it's not doing any harm. These anecdotes are mentioned not to claim much of anything. They only point out that if you don't want to go along with the game, the forces involved are not strong enough to overrule you. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But there are people who believe that if you're in the right state-of-mind at the right place at the right moment, the forces involved can be very strong indeed. In one of John Mullins' cases, mentioned in the last post, the rod tore itself away so strongly that it broke itself. Regarding the megaliths, a person who believed that the powers were real and easily sensible was John Williams of Abergavenny Wales. Williams is apparently known by British insiders in the Ley Line/ Earth Energies community but not much elsewhere [and I gather not even that much overseas--he may becoming a bit of a forgotten man]. I, of course, wouldn't have had a clue if a rough draft of an incomplete manuscript hadn't come into my hands. Entitled "In Search of King Arthur" and dated confusingly, sometimes 1965 and sometimes 1980, it is in an unexpected way about Arthur, but is largely about Stones and energies associated with them. Williams' discovery is of "bands" of energy of different types and potencies which exist at different levels above and below the Earth. I. obviously, have no way of knowing if any of this is true. As Williams goes far beyond this to imagine great, almost-"grids" of energies casting across the landscape, and serving as the Earth's template for the ancients' placement of megaliths country-wide, the concept goes entirely beyond my data, and starts sounding as the potential land use plan for Out Proctor. Williams has, of course, dowsed all this, mostly using a pendulum. As you read his draft, you get the impression of an intelligently sane man who has, he feels, plenty of empirical data for what he is writing. He also tells a story of a British film crew coming out to film his ideas at the locations of the stones. After telling the crew about one of the more powerful energy bands, one of them wanted to "try it". Cameras rolling, she placed her hands on the appropriate "band" and immediately was turned and pushed to the side. Everyone in the crew laughed at this, while Williams was staggered by their casual amusement at the filming of a phenomenon entirely unrecognized by conventional science. The extent of the ignorance and jadedness of the media has no limit.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Williams got paid the massive sum of 20pounds for his trouble, and, as far as he could tell, the film was only shown as part of a mysteries series on Welsh TV. They had shot the phenomenon of the girl being pushed from the stone more than once--once in slow motion with Williams himself, as they wanted to show the directional nature of the force exerted. That's when things got noticeably Out Proctor. Here's the quote [the filmers were concentrating on the action and didn't notice this until they got the show ready for the air.] "On 27th September 1979 I was surprised when Brynmore Williams telephoned me in my office from London and told me that the part of the film taken in slow motion on 16th July 1976 showed an object appearing from a cloud and disappearing behind the prehistoric standing stone just as I was being thrown away from the top of the standing stone with my hands and fingers outstretched above my head. The speed of the object had been calculated by a mathematician in the BBC studios as the incredible speed of 16000 miles per hour" [incredible indeed as there is no way to do such a calculation when you don't have a means of knowing the distance--trust me, I'm a doctor]. Although the speed was a bogus calculation, and not Williams' fault, we can probably accept that some pale yellow oval UFO raced quickly across the sky coincidentally with his Earth energy experiment. Whether we pay any attention to that or not, Williams did. He wondered if he may have discovered a way to contact "another kind of world which is just outside the range of our five normal senses". You can read such in the handwriting to the left. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe we don't like to mix dowsing with UFOs. Some would; some wouldn't. The "Ley Hunters" [I'd define this for you if any universally agreed-upon definition existed] seem to take a creative stand about this: "UFOs" exist but they are some sort of manifestation of these Earth mysteries that we're generally talking about here. Paul Devereux [see the insert on the magazine cover] is the former talented and imaginative editor of the, also-former Ley Hunter magazine. Paul became a relentless debunker of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs, though a thoughtful and civilized one [this is something that you cannot say for all such folks, particularly those from "across-the-pond"]. Paul was certain that the ETH did not work for UFOs. I don't know what he felt about ideas like Williams' but I imagine that there was some sympathy there. The particular issue of the LH shown, by the way, contains a major [and concerned] message by Tom Graves distressed over the inability of the big thinkers in the Ley field to be able to come to agreement on almost anything that they had been talking about---shades of UFOlogy. Many dowsers would happily just leave larger concepts like Leys alone and concentrate on the microproblems of what dowsing can or can not do on the site. There have been several archaeologists for instance who have shocked their colleagues by admitting [once their reputations had been established] that the secret to their success in locating buried sites/structures was dowsing. CSICOP no doubt crapped their cumulative pants. I'm going to end by going back to my friend "Bill". He came to me, just a year ago, and admitted that he experienced something with the dowsing rod that boggled him--this is one of the most un-boggleable persons on the planet. As part of his interests in genealogy, he was looking up gravestone markers in a New England cemetery. As he really does have a bit of the adventurer in him--despite no Irish blood, alas--he had taken along his dowsing rods. The rods behaved differently over some graves than others. Was there any pattern? Yes. Being who he is, he saw it after many tries. The rods moved differently over a male grave than they did over a female one. WHOA! I just went Out Proctor.
Whether or not things like dowsing actually work, one of the things I find most preposterous about sceptics is when they imply because such things didn't work for them it's tantamount to proof the whole thing's a sham.
ReplyDeleteOn that basis, giving a set of paints and a brush to most people on the planet'd prove it was impossible to paint pictures like the Mona Lisa.
Similarly, providing a huge number of people with a slide rule or even a calculator could be used to PROVE a belief in Mathematics was symptomatic of being delusional.
I'm in complete agreement with you on that. We also have the analogous thing in UFOlogy where the sarcastic debunker says that HE'S never seen one so obviously they don't exist. One scientist told Ed Condon during the Colorado project that the only witness he'd consider credible would be a well-known scientist [not any old scientist]. My way of operating on all these things is to listen to everybody, look for "objective" evidence if there is any, see if there are any "contextual correlates" [that is things not directly on the target of the evidence but which might give a strong point of relating to the mystery which could strengthen or weaken the odds on the case], then weigh up my pile of anecdotes looking for consistencies, and place the mystery in a brighter or darker "gray basket". Sometimes the "pile" is so large and convincing that the mystery is very bright indeed. But our debunker "friends" are so concerned about these things that no amount of anecdote from others counts. Everything in the blog so far is a mystery that I believe has truth in it somewhere, even though certain theories about one or the other I believe not to be true. That's when I get into trouble, as we anomalists are sometimes no better than the debunkers when our favorite theories are challenged, even when the challenger is still sympathetic to the reality of the anomaly itself. There is no greater intellectual pleasure than sitting down to discuss a mystery in open-minded and forgiving ways. There is also no greater intellectual displeasure than hoping for such a discussion and running into friends at least as hung up as our enemies. I like your analogies on this topic as to truth-finding. Wish that everyone felt as you do. By the way, Dick Bull, despite his skepticism on dowsing, was a pretty nice fellow. He in that context just didn't like that particular "showman" hoaxing/manipulating the rest of the people on the tour. He'd probably never get into the right frame of mind to give it a good test, but I personally would have loved to have William Barrett let me participate in one. In almost all these things, there are incidents wherein the truth is not being served, both ways. As a UFOlogist I've had to debunk many bad errors and bad practitioners for the good of the field. It's a hard thing. Our recently deceased friend, Dick Hall, was the best at slapping the bunk out of our field, and we're grateful to him for doing that tough duty.
ReplyDeleteIntuition helps downloading the information typically not available to our senses.
ReplyDeleteCall it a still voice, a hint or a gut feeling - whenever it begins manifesting you will comprehend
that it's no coincidence.!
Dowsing is a technique someone can use to gain access to the intuition by using dowsing pendulum or otherwise divining rod.
I have been using it for a long time and In my opinion any individual will likely learn it.
Feel free to visit my blog pendulum dowsing
Do you think there is a connection between the Crop Circles (the real one, not the human made one) with these strange phenomena ? if the 'energy' can move dowsing rod or pendulum or a person, theoritically it can also create a ring-shaped circles in the middle of some wheat fields or corn fields ...
ReplyDeletewhat do you think about edwin fuhr's experience ? http://www.ufocasebook.com/2010/fuhr1974.html
Langenburg, Saskatchewan, Canada - September 1, 1974
On Sept. 1 1974, Edwin Fuhr was on his swather in a field of rapeseed, moving up a small incline, he glanced up to make sure he would skirt a grassy, dried out slough just ahead when he spied something made of metal in the grass. His first thought was that someone was playing a joke on him or had dumped junk in the old slough. As the swather moved up the incline, the slough came into full view. The metallic “something” was one of five machines rotating rapidly and hovering just above the grass.
Fuhr, startled, stopped his swather, climbed down and took a few steps toward the hovering machines. Then, overcome with fear, he stopped and began slowly to ease back to his idling swather.
The machines continued to hover and spin, then slowly lifted. About 100 feet above ground, they maneuvered into an echelon formation and rose at a much greater speed. Each vented a brief puff of smoke and in seconds. Disappeared over the horizon. At the controls of his swather, Fuhr was almost paralyzed with fright and barely able to put the machine into gear. At lunch, he was unable to eat. When he inspected the site where the strange visitors had been, he saw five circular depressions.
Most of the tall grass was pressed down, and, in places, was twisted as it would be by a spinning object. The circles were exactly 11 feet (3.3 meters) in diameter and there was unflattened grass in the centre.
1). I'm not sure that there are any "good" crop circles beyond human ones, unless you count the early simple swirls.
Delete2). Edwin Fuhr almost certainly witnessed a UFO phenomenon, leaving behind simple matted swirls.