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. ↩
Hidden connections 1
Entities named in this page's prose without an explicit wikilink — surfaced by scanning for known titles and aliases.
Local network
Dowsing's direct connections. Click any node to navigate, drag to pan, scroll (or pinch) to zoom. + 2‑hop expands the neighborhood one level further.
An interactive diagram of Dowsing's connections, drawn on a canvas and explored with a pointer. The same connections are listed as links in the Connected and Mentioned-in sections below.
Legend — how to read this graph
- People
- Organizations
- Programs
- Events
- Concepts
- Places
Larger = more mentions across the vault.
Explicit link (wikilink between entries).
Inferred connection (name co-mention) — toggle with “Inferred”.
Gold ring — a bridge entity linking distant clusters.
Accent ring — your current selection.