Water Dowsing
WATER DOWSING IN ARID REGIONS:

Report on a 10 year German Government Project
(Based on the Article published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration
Stanford University Stanford, Ca. USA , March 27, 1995)

In an article published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration, a science journal with the editorial offices at Stanford University, Professor Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, presents the results of a German government sponsored program to test and apply dowsing methods to locate water sources in arid regions. This ten year project involved over 2000 drillings in Sri Lanka, Zaire, Kenya, Namibia, Yemen and other countries and is thus the most ambitious experiment with water dowsing ever carried out.

Many studies of Dowsing applications have been made over the past century or so, but such research has always been vulnerable to insidious sceptical criticism that their evidence was too biased or too anecdotal to be offered as definitive scientific proof of the efficacy of Dowsing.While an adequate water supply is not a major problem in most industrialized nations, it is estimated that water pollution is responsible for some 80% of all diseases in Third World countries. Lack of high quality drinking water affects approximately two billion people on a worldwide scale and is a problem that is growing, according to the United Nations.

The enormity of this problem led the German government to initiate a long range program via the GTZ(Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zussammenarbeit or German Association for Technical Cooperation) to explore innovative water detection methods in arid regions. Motivated by both the high cost and modest success rate of purely conventional hydrogeological methods, the GTZ project teamed geological experts, experienced dowsers and a scientific group led by Professor Betz to monitor and evaluate the results, and principally, the achievements of an Engineer on the GTZ Project Management staff, Hans Schroter, who was also a Water Diviner of proven ability, who could locate deep or shallow groundwater sources with pinpoint accuracy, and also determine their depth and their potential yield, prior to drilling, without detailed geological knowledge of the areas he was working in.

Schroter worked alongside professional Hydrogeologists on a variety of groundwater development projects in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Congo, Niger, Yemen, the Cape Verde Islands, Kenya, Namibia, and the Sinai peninsula in Egypt; to locate over 2000 boreholes with staggeringly high project success rates of 80% to 96%... even in these desert and semi-desert areas where the comparable conventional methods achieved much lower success rates of only 10% to 50%.

Statistical evaluation of Schroter's ability in a controlled experiment, was made in a direct comparison with the efforts of an expert Hydrogeology and Geophysics team. Targets for Minimum Individual Borehole Yield, and Total Yield, were set; and under these tough goal-oriented test conditions, Hans Schroter proved to be more successful than the Hydrogeology team by a factor of 4x !

Science has got to wake-up and take notice, when one man with relatively little geological knowledge, his humble faith and his divining rod, can pinpoint and assess groundwater aquifers with fourfold greater accuracy than the best efforts of a professional team of Geoscientists and a heap of expensive Geophysical equipment!

Dowsing was proved to be effective in all geological environments, especially in regions of crystalline igneous and metamorphic rocks where groundwater is confined almost exclusively to narrow fracture zones, that cannot be located with any reliability by conventional geoscientific methods except at great expense, and after drilling a significant number of unproductive test bores.

The study makes repeated observations that Schroter and other competent water diviners were consistently able to IDENTIFY FROM A DISTANCE, then PINPOINT AND ASSESS fresh groundwater sources in terms of EXACT LOCATION, DEPTH RANGE, and POTENTIAL YIELD with a degree of accuracy far beyond the capability of even the best geophysical instruments, and most educated hydrogeological guesswork.

The outcome was striking. An overall success rate of 96% (by dowsers) was achieved in 691 drillings in Sri Lanka. Based on geological experience in that area, a success rate of 30-50% would be expected from conventional techniques alone.

But the overall success rate is not the only indication that the dowsing phenomenon is of considerable practical use. According to Betz, what is both puzzling but enormously useful, is that in hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well to within 10 to 20 percent. We carefully considered the statistics of these correlations, and they far exceeded lucky guesses.

Numerous conventional explanations for the success of dowsing-located drill sites were carefully examined by Betz in a series of reports summarized in the article. Virtually all of the drill sites were in regions where the odds of finding water by random drilling were extremely low, thus eliminating the success by chance hypothesis.

Another argument sometimes advanced is that dowsers get subtle clues from the landscape and geology, perhaps without even being consciously aware of their highly developed detective skills. This too was ruled out in various ways, the most impressive being the ability of dowsers to locate underground sources, often 100 feet down, whose streams are so narrow that misplacing the drill site by a few feet would yield a dry hole. Such precision is far beyond any know geological indicators.

Betz conjectures that there may be subtle electromagnetic gradients resulting from the fissures and water flows creating changes in the electrical properties of rock and soil. The dowsers somehow sense these gradients in a hypersensitive state. Says Betz: I’m a scientist, and those are my best plausible scientific hypotheses at this point. But there are two things that I am certain of after ten years of field research. A combination of dowsing and modern hydro-geophysical techniques can be both more successful and far less expensive than we had thought. And we need to run a lot more tests, because we have established that dowsing works...

The actual Article was published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration, / Stanford University by Hans-Dieter Betz, 1995.

The Publishers of the Betz report are:-
Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH.
Dag-Hammarskjold-Weg 1-2. Postfach 5180. D-65726 Eschborn 1. Germany.

The international libraries catalogue reference is:-
Betz, Hans-Dieter: Unconventional Water Detection - Field Test of the Dowsing Technique in Dry Zones. 2nd Edition: ISBN 3-88085-489-0

Read the full Betz Report,  published on the net by the Journal of Scientific Exploration, at http://www.jse.com/ (Check the index list for "Online Sample Articles" and Click-on "Unconventional Water Detection".)