The Witching Hour – Part 2

AESAC is pleased to present a series of guest blogs, reprinted with the courtesy of one of our colleagues, exploring the interesting topic of witching and dowsing: 
The Witching Hour
By: Colin Kelly, P. Geo., QPESA

So, the ideomotor response is the mechanism that causes the witching sticks to move. But how does the locator subconsciously know when to move them? At least in a way that tracks buried lines at rate better than random chance? This is the part that speaks to the locators’ experience and intuition. Consider that an experienced locator may have scoped out hundreds or thousands of different properties. In that time, they will have seen numerous different utility plans. They will have likely developed a pretty good knack for how and where a plumber, for example, would choose to install a water line. And the positions of underground lines are often predictable, especially to the trained mind. Installers will usually choose the most efficient path, from utility terminal to main, to save money on effort and material. The locator may have also previously located the very same property they are witching years ago, or have seen plans for it, and have simply just forgotten about it. Witching sort of taps into that deeper memory of the subconscious, in a sort of way that hypnosis does. Witching allows a locator to home in on professional intuition, pick up very subtle clues (like a slight depression in the grass), and begin to remember long forgotten information. That “gut feel” by an experienced professional is often a right one.

As nothing is safe from skeptical review, several objective studies have been held to see if there was anything special to witching. Two of the larger and well-known studies having were conducted in Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had self-proclaimed “dowsers” to come out and prove their skills[2]. The later study also offered a $10,000 USD prize to anyone that could consistently find the researchers’ buried targets at a rate that was better than dumb luck. Spoiler alert – no one won the prize. 

What the studies showed is that under very controlled conditions, witching provided no better results than pure chance.  Also revealing, however, is the length to which the researchers needed to go to in purging their study areas of even the slightest clues. In early iterations of the studies, witchers were doing slightly better than random chance (noting some statistical debate around that). They were picking up on the tiny reactions of nearby researchers that knew the locations of the buried targets and getting a bit of intuitive assistance as a result. Reactions like a researcher’s slight gasp of amazement caught out of the corner of the eye as a witcher approached the bullseye. The researchers had to correct this by with double-blind studies (i.e., studies in which neither the witchers nor the researchers knew the target locations). 

[2]Check out the Scheunen Experiments for further reading. Below links to a pretty nice, detailed summary:
http://www.dowsing-research.net/dowsing/articles/Enright__1-1%20-%20Water%20Dowsing%20-%20the%20Scheunen%20Experiments.pdf

Colin Kelly, P. Geo., QPESA
Colin is the founder and President of CXK Environmental Consulting, in Waterloo, ON. You can contact Colin at ckelly@cxkenvironmental.com