Dowsing
Dowsing is a divinatory practice used to locate water, minerals, or other hidden objects using a divining rod, usually a forked twig, but also a pendulum or one's hand.
Dowsing is a divinatory practice used to locate water, minerals, or other hidden objects using a divining rod, usually a forked twig, but also a pendulum or one's hand. It is an ancient practice, with drawings of men with divining rods found in prehistoric cave paintings dating back to 6000 BC.1
In the context of psychic research, dowsing, particularly "map dowsing," was explored for its potential applications in intelligence gathering. Uri Geller reportedly used map dowsing to help General Moshe Dayan locate ancient artifacts in Israel. The U.S. military also experimented with dowsing during the Vietnam War, with Marines using dowsing rods to locate Viet Cong tunnels.1
Despite its historical use and anecdotal successes, dowsing is largely considered pseudoscience by the mainstream scientific community, as its effectiveness has not been consistently demonstrated under controlled conditions.1
Sources
- Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩
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