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Bill Martin doesn't look like your typical witch.
He's a fourth-generation well-digger, a ballcap-wearing, churchgoing 72-year-old who's still active in the family firm.
He's a practical man. He uses all the tools available to him, including one natural and ancient water-finding method some say reaches clear back to Moses.
Martin is, depending on where you were raised, a "water witch," a "peacher," a "dowser" or a "diviner." Using only a forked tree twig or a couple of metal rods grasped in his callused hands, the Penn Township man detects water flowing deep underground. For 40 years, he's found unmarked graves, unmapped gas and power lines, and forgotten mines this way.[continued]
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04035/268864.stm
This is a funny issue for me. My dad - now 70 - does not believe in ghosts, UFOs, ET of any kind, ESP, or anything else "supernatural", however years ago he used dowsing to find power lines and water pipes on a fairly regular basis. He never realized that this isn't supposed to work. He was quite incredulous when I explained that this is considered nonsense by most scientists. It usually worked well for him and for the salt of the Earth uncle who showed him how to do it. They have both used this to solve real, everyday problems in a professional setting. He also showed me how to do it but I have never tested my own skills.
My best guess: I saw a science program about a study of this. High speed video shows that dowsers react before the rods - the muscles in the arm can be seen to flex before the dowsing rod responds. In other words, the dowser causes the action of the dowsing rod, not the water or power lines. At a glance this implies that dowsing is a bogus skill, but I think this relates to some primitive, natural ability within us to find water. It seems to me that the dowsing rods only act as motion amplifiers that alert us to our own subtle reactions.
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