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In ancient science, the world was thought to be comprised of four elements.

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Earth, air, fire, and water.

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Water was and still is considered to be the essence of life itself.

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But fresh water is not always available to us where and when we need it.

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Through the centuries, however, certain people have been able to detect its hidden presence

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by an ability which has yet to be explained.

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Water-witching, divining, dousing, whatever name it's given,

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remains one of the most puzzling mysteries of nature.

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A solitary figure seeks out a new source of water using a divining rod,

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one of the most primitive tools known to man.

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As unscientific or even comical as this method may seem to some,

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more serious consideration is being given to the technique than ever before.

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In the past few years, the severe droughts that struck much of the United States

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have forced scientists to examine every possible technology which might prevent future calamities.

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Many pioneers died crossing the western deserts to settle the Pacific coast.

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Yet geologists acknowledge that beneath those treacherous sands

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and those of other continents as well, is enough water to satisfy all of today's needs.

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But the question is how to find it?

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Some of the most advanced research is being carried out in England.

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Here in the West Country, the word dousing had its origins,

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and long before King Arthur, dousers were finding ancient wells and springs.

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In those times, fresh water was not only valued but hallowed,

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with sacred properties for healing attributed to it.

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To head our current investigation, we called in a respected expert in the field, Francis Hitchings.

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One of the results of this resurgence of interest in dousing

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is the growing number of books on the subject, all of them dealing with a specific aspect.

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I myself got involved because I wanted to write a book which was a state-of-the-art account of it,

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and when I began two years ago, I must say I thought that dousing was probably all a load of hocus

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which would never stand up to experimental investigation.

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However, after that time, having gone to the States and all around Britain,

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looking at douses and talking to them, I've discovered that dousing certainly does work.

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The only questions remaining for me are the two.

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One, how often does dousing work?

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And secondly, how well?

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Tom Graves, who used to teach dousing officially for the inner London educational authority,

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believes that anybody can be taught to douse.

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London Education Authority, I taught about 500 people.

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I only had two really total failures. They were both professional scientists.

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Their problem was they were too busy analyzing what wasn't happening.

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Dousing, as far as I'm concerned, is a skill, much like any other skill.

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It does take a certain amount of instinct, a feel, a practice, and very little else.

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Dousing has always been, first and foremost, a practical matter.

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When you have trouble with your water supply, like John Mitchell, high on the Yorkshire Moors,

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you look for a douser.

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I rely on well water for my everything, in fact.

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The well was built in 1700 when the house was built,

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and it's never run dry at all until this year, when it completely dried up.

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John Mitchell called on Dr. Arthur Bailey, a top-level scientist and senior lecturer in electronics at Bradford University.

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He is also president of the British Society of Dousers,

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and is on the society's list of professionals who can be trusted to go to work on problems like John Mitchell's.

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Well, this is the well. Looking down it, there's nothing at all to be seen.

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So the first thing to do is to establish, in fact, if there is a flow of water into the well, or if it's completely dry.

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I do this by using vertical angular odds, these are they,

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and by walking around the well, we can see if there's a flow of water into it.

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They're starting to move, so I should be on the edge of a flow of water, and in fact,

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it's quite a strong flow.

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They're then open out again.

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So the flow of water into that well is about perhaps 18 inches wide.

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It's a good flow of water, so there is water into the well.

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The next thing to do is to see which way it's flowing.

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And if I concentrate on direction of flow, the rods move that way,

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showing that it's flowing down in a direction from the house further up the field, down this way, and out towards the quarry.

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The next thing to do is to see if that water flow is in fact flowing into the well,

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because if it's too deep, of course, it will miss it completely.

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So again, I find the centre line of the stream,

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and then from there, walk out until the rods cross once more, and that will give me the depth.

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So starting off from there, still nothing.

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It's obviously a very deep flow of water.

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Still nothing. Ah, there we go.

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That's it.

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I subsequently paced this out and discovered the flow of water is about 100 feet deep.

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Checking afterwards with Mr Mitchell, he in fact confirmed this figure

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that the depth of his well is approximately 100 feet.

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So this shows that the flow of water is running right through the bottom of his well.

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So what has happened is that the original 15 feet depth of water that he used to rely on for pumping has disappeared,

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and this appears to be due to the blasting that's been taking place in the quarry.

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Unfortunately for Mr Mitchell, his property is adjacent to a rock quarry where dynamiting has taken a precious toll.

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It seems he will have to extend his deep well even deeper.

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Dowsers have long talked about primary water, water of great purity, rising through narrow fissures deep below the earth's surface.

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Geologists have recently come to believe it may be formed by cooling down processes at the earth's core.

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They call it juvenile water, and although there's a great deal of it, it can usually be located only by dowsing methods,

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because the veins through which it rises have to be precisely located.

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Geologists and dowsers are nowadays much more in communication with each other,

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but in the past, the dowsers' art has seemed so mysterious that witchcraft and magic have been suspected.

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Although the skills of divining were practiced by ancient people, Christianity forced dowsing underground,

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along with alchemy, and other forms of occult knowledge.

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But still it kept going, and modern dowsing began when Queen Elizabeth I imported dowsers from Germany to find underground veins of tin, metal, and gold.

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Springs, fountains, and healing wells were sacred places long before churches and cathedrals were built over them,

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perhaps to absorb their supposedly mystic powers.

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So what happens when the rod starts twitching spontaneously in someone's hand?

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To people like Pat Lucas, Britain's only professional woman dowser, there is an unmistakable physical sensation.

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I was taught to dows by Mr George, who came from Radnyshire.

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He was a famous old dowser and has been dead for a number of years now.

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He taught me to hold the hazel tweak, which is one I always use, this way,

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laid in the flat of the hands with the thumb on the side of the tweak,

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and the tweak arms resting on the first two fingers, holding it horizontal with the arms nice and relaxed,

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and with no open tension on the throat of the tweak.

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He said, don't put any energy into the tweak, it'll come with its own accord.

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So I know I'm different from a lot of dowsers in this, but I still stick to what he told me.

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He told me also to go very slowly and to concentrate on what I was looking for, and this I try to do as well.

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What I feel is an energy, I can only put it as an energy, which seems to pull right through my body,

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through my arms, through my legs, I start everything right through, and I get a pulsing effect here very often,

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as if my heart races. I think the heartbeat does accelerate quite a bit when you come into a big body of water,

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or even a small one, if you cross it enough times, it seems to build up and your heart gets agitated.

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I sometimes get a dead thumb, one side or the other, if I keep crossing the stream.

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The total effect is one of physical exhaustion and physical tiredness,

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plus obviously mental tiredness from the concentration, but it's entirely natural as far as I'm concerned.

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It feels as if you've done jolly hard days of work and I enjoyed it.

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It appears from Pat Lucas' experience that there is a physiological basis for dowsing,

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some kind of energy that comes up from underground streams which dowsers can literally feel.

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The question remains, however, can modern science find any way of explaining this phenomenon?

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We're about to attempt an experiment never tried before.

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In order to determine whether or not a change takes place in the dowsers' brain when his response occurs,

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a new device has been built by a biofeedback expert, John Steele, who calls his equipment a mind mirror.

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Now on the mind mirror we have the four basic different patterns of brain waves.

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Beta waves over here on both sides represent information processing and alarm reactions.

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The alpha, which is a slower frequency, represents an open, passive state of awareness,

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which is the basis of meditation and other related states.

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The theta waves, which are slower yet, represent inspiration, creativity and visual imagery,

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such as asenism and dreaming.

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And the delta, which is the slowest waves that we have, we usually expect to see them only in sleeping.

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We now find in healing and in ESP phenomena, and we would expect to see them also in dowsing,

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which is a characteristic of the mind reaching out into the unknown.

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Basically good, the atmospheric balance in the right and left side letters.

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That's it, I'll give you a little bit of alpha flickering over out there.

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I'll try the most activity up in the beta ring.

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Little spots of alpha beginning to come in, which is indicative of open passive states.

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We basically began with alpha blocking state, which is this pattern right here.

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As you can see, there's no alpha right here. We have a lot of beta and a lot of delta.

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Very calm passive aware state.

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Now, after we began to dows and move towards the water source, a definite change did take place, which is as such.

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We move to this pattern over here, where we have the basic configuration again of the alpha blocking.

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But this time, as you can see, a small alpha spike comes into the middle.

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Now, this alpha spike represents a below the threshold stimulus, trying to break into awareness.

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This is indicative of what we might call an ESP phenomena, starting to come through to consciousness.

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The alpha represents a very open and natural state.

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That's very reassuring for me, John, because I've always thought it was a very natural thing.

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Scientifically speaking, some outside event must take place to trigger off these mental and physical reactions.

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Some signal that says, water is here.

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Basically, there are two theories about this signal.

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Either it comes from within the electromagnetic spectrum, with the body acting in some way like a radio receiver,

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or there's some kind of physical energy involved, not yet known to science.

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Harry Lovegrove is an electronics engineer who may be on the verge of a breakthrough with the electromagnetic theory.

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Believing the human body can sense minute changes in microwave heat coming up from the Earth's core,

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he has developed an artificial way of reproducing this phenomenon by laying down electromagnetic lines.

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However, before he demonstrated this, an independent dowser was asked to come in and locate an area free from ground disturbance.

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When dowsing across the yard, there's absolutely nothing here. This area is completely clear.

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I can feel something coming up. There's something here.

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Well, that's the main drain. You can see it there. That's running right through the yard this way.

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And this is absolutely clear. Over here.

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Now, to a dowser, the whole of the ground would appear to be as though it was made of a plate glass, frosted glass,

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and heat from below when it passes pipes or water or anything which can disturb the rays from beneath will cause a shadow on the surface.

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Now, what I have here is a piece of apparatus which I've designed and built.

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It gives out an electromagnetic wave which causes a shadow on the ground

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exactly the same way as a natural shadow is caused by a pipe or anything else interfering with the radiation coming up from below.

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So having got the machine exactly level, which is very, very critical,

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I shall now try and set this beam down, switch on, and now this beam is slowly affecting the ground,

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and after a minute or two, this will lay down a shadow pattern across the ground which anybody can douse for the next two or three weeks.

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After the machine was removed, the dowser returned to see if he could detect the electromagnetic line.

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He did so with 100% accuracy.

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And it's...

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...on a line through there.

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Mr. Lovegrove's microwave experiment seems to have been proven out.

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However, even if subsequent research independently substantiates Harry Lovegrove's theories,

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it's unlikely that he's come up with the whole answer.

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Occasionally, a handful of the very best dousers do things so mysterious that they're quite beyond explanation.

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Take for instance their use of the pendulum.

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Now, there are a number of substantiated cases of where, using a pendulum like this,

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dousers have discovered the exact location of crashed airplanes, missing people, murder victims, stolen goods, and so on.

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One douser who's renowned for such feats is Bill Lewis of Abergavenny in South Wales.

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Over a period of three years now, I've conducted a series of tests with him to find out just how accurate he is

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and how often he achieves his apparently supernatural results.

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He's one of the people who believes that ancient standing stones in many parts of the world were built above the crossing of underground streams.

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Now, I'd heard that a number of these stones existed in New England, but as they're not marked on maps there, I didn't know where to look for them.

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So Bill Lewis noted down where he thought they'd be, and in the end he gave me some 55 archaeological features all over the United States for me to go and check up on.

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And that I did. I went round the states on a round trip and I took photographs wherever I went trying to find out whether he was right or whether he was wrong.

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And if you consider the odds against finding anything when you're dotting a pencil onto maps covering an area of 9,500 square miles the other side of the Atlantic,

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the results that Bill Lewis came up with are truly remarkable. Overall, he was 40% accurate, and this included finding three hibbetu undiscovered standing stones in Vermont,

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one of them the tallest yet found.

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This 40% success rate recurred on a number of occasions during the experiments I carried out during that three year period.

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And I've been forced to the conclusion that there are really two elements to dousing. One of them you might call psychical,

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the kind of work that Bill Lewis and other people get up to where you can't rely on it, but it does happen sometimes and it's a fact that can't be ignored.

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The other one is practical, physical. Water dousing particularly. That I guess has been going on since the dawn of mankind and it's still providing the livelihood for experts like Stan Shepherd of Devon.

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I go onto the site and by my rods, my steel rod, I react where the water is flowing in as much as I turn around until I locate it.

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To keep myself turning, I'm eliminating any small streams or difficult subterranean subsurface water. I've got it there.

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I know my water, of course, is running down in that area. I know then that I've got to go to it to find its nearest edge.

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I'm getting closer now. I'm feeling something and I've hit it. Now then, I have to go further on and work back to it again.

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Now I've got to go towards the actual water course itself again.

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Then it's got me. So I then back onto into the center of the course. By going across it like this, I can hit the center of it.

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That's right in the center. I do that four times to strike the actual point of drilling.

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When Stan Shepherd first started his own water drilling company, his was the smallest of seven local operators. Today, none of the other companies are still in business.

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So confident was he in his dousing ability that he worked on the basis of no water, no fee. And after 50 years, he can still claim that he has never drilled a dry well.

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We've seen dousers from many walks of life. They claim that the ability to douse is perfectly natural, a sixth sense, latent in everyone.

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But like most things, it takes time and experience to master. Because science cannot yet explain how dousing works, it has been at best disbelieved, at worst branded as witchcraft and magic.

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There's a lot more research and investigation that will have to be done to evaluate these phenomena. Nature is always slow to reveal her secrets.

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And when she does, she usually does so in small stages.

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Coming up next, 20th century with Mike Wallace reports on the worldwide spread of industrial pollution and the dangers we now face from global warming.

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Then weapons at war tracks the sixth century evolution of artillery cannons.

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And later tonight, what happened to the Neanderthal cave dwellers Histories Mysteries investigates at 8, here on the History Channel, where the past comes alive.

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Music