There is, in this endlessly gullible world of ours, no shortage of ways to make yourself look like a prize fool, but none—none—compares to the unique spectacle of a grown adult stumbling around a field, clutching two bent pieces of wire like they’re about to divine the very secrets of the universe.
Dowsing, for the blissfully uninitiated, is the ancient and noble art of wandering aimlessly with a pair of sticks or metal rods until you convince yourself you’ve found something that was never missing in the first place. Usually water. Sometimes buried treasure. Sometimes ghosts. Because when you’re dealing with a technique this scientifically robust, why stop at underground streams? Why not locate your missing car keys while you’re at it?
Picture, if you will, a sunburned man in cargo shorts, staggering across an empty field with the solemnity of Moses parting the Red Sea, staring with desperate intensity at two twitching coat hangers and waiting for them to cross like some mystical game of Operation. When they inevitably do—because physics, inertia, and the sheer trembling uncertainty of human hands demand it—he will gasp, declare the spot sacred, and start digging like a Labrador on a caffeine bender. That he finds nothing, or finds something two feet to the left, or finds an old tuna can rusting in the dirt, will not dissuade him. No, the rods must have been “blocked by interference,” or “moved by a ley line,” or “confused by the spiritual trauma of the land,” or some other staggering concatenation of excuses cobbled together out of twigs, wishful thinking, and an absolute allergy to basic physics.
And oh, the excuses. Dowsers are to excuses what Mozart was to sonatas—virtuosos of hand-waving and revisionist history. When a dowser fails to locate water in a place devoid of water, it is never because the method is complete and utter hogwash. It’s because the water has “moved.” Water, you see, is notoriously mischievous, tunneling through granite, defying gravity, and scooting away from your magical witch sticks the moment it senses your superior intelligence approaching. Or perhaps you, poor mortal fool, simply were not in the right state of mind to allow the rods to guide you. Yes, your skeptical thoughts contaminated the spiritual Wi-Fi and now the rods have gone rogue. Amazing how metal is so spiritually sensitive, yet still ends up in landfills by the metric ton when no one’s willing to hold it reverently over their heads.
What continues to baffle is not that dowsing persists among the superstitious fringes of humanity—there will always be a few who, confronted with the option of learning geology, instead opt to jiggle some twigs and call it insight—but that municipalities, yes, municipalities, have been caught paying dowsers to find water lines. In the 21st century. In countries with nuclear arsenals. Somewhere, a physicist cries into his lab coat every time a city budget allocates taxpayer dollars for a man named Earl to wave a bent antenna over a sewer grate and declare it “rich in underground aquifers.”
And let’s not forget the endless parade of dowsing upgrades for the modern era: crystal-tipped rods, pendulums infused with cosmic energy, $400 copper rod sets blessed by Peruvian shamans who are very good at taking Visa and MasterCard. Because if there’s one thing more profitable than selling snake oil, it’s selling luxury snake oil to people who believe their backyard is sitting atop a hidden spring that only opens with the correct frequency of self-deception.
If your great technological breakthrough can be replicated by a ten-year-old with a coat hanger and a head full of sugar, it is not a science. It is recess with delusions of grandeur.