Russia’s secret weapon — a water diviner

Press, 12 March 1982, Page 13

Russia’s secret weapon — a water diviner

In an age of nuclear weapons and spy satellites. Russia still relies on the gifts of men with forked willow sticks

By

JUDSON BENNETT

Wherever Russia's crack infantry go in their campaign against the Afghanistan guerrillas, a handful of men wielding willow-sticks and pendulums go, too.

They are Russia’s 5000-year-old secret weapon — the Soviet corps of dowsers, experts who use their mysterious gift of detecting water and metals to locate booby traps, mines, and other hidden military hardware.

The Red Army , detachments now massed near Russia’s Polish border are never without their dowsing units, either. For in an age of nuclear weapons and spy satellites, the uncanny art of dowsing remains a major factor in Russian military strategy.

An estimated 10.000 dowsers are being trained at an academy near Leningrad. When qualified, they will go into the army or into industry.

An admiration of dowsing seems to be one of the few things Russia and America have in common.

In April, American scientist, Dr Wilmer Slovin, one of the world’s leading dowsers, will receive a special award from Moscow’s Academy of Science for his work in developing the dowser’s art. Far from being regarded as some folksy fad, dowsing, or divining, is at last being accepted as a serious and useful gift, which nearly 20 per cent of the population are claimed to have ... if

only they knew how to develop it. Today, every major water and pipeline company in the United States has a dowser on the payroll, and the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture employs a department of permanent dowsers. U.N.E.S.C.O. has a team of dowsers and minerologists to pursue official investigations, and the geology departments of Moscow State and Leningrad universities have recently launched a full-scale international investigation into dowsing — not to find out if it works, but to discover how it works.

It looks suspiciously like magic when a water diviner stops in the middle of a field or desert and says: “Dig here, there’s a spring below.” It is even more magical when the well is dug and water bubbles to the surface.

But, says the International Society of Minerologists and Water Diviners, which has headquarters in Mannheim, Germany: “One person out of six could probably do it, if he knew how to develop the skill.

“But the person with a real natural flair for locating water and minerals is more likely one in five thousand.” Recent experiments have shown that the dowsing force, whatever it is, cannot work on the • dowsing rod alone. For instance, Dutch geologist, Dr Solco Tromp, of

the Water Sciences Department of Holland’s University of Utrecht, believes that a human being has to be the “middle man.” He says that dowsers are unusually sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field and respond to changes in the field that can be verified with magnetometers.

He has also found out that a good dowser can detect an artificial magnetic field which is only one two hundredth the strength of that of the Earth.

Dowsers recently tested in the Laboratoire de Physique in Paris were able to tell whether an electric current was switched on simply by walking past a coil at a metre’s distance with their dowsing rods held at the ready.

Dowsers, or diviners, use anything from Y-shaped willow or hazel sticks to copper rods and pendulums. The Japanese claim to be able to determine the sex of chicks before the eggs hatch with the aid of nothing else but a bead on the end of a piece of silk thread. Hatching factories claim a success rate of 99 per cent for the system. Two possible explanations for detecting underground water are that either the subconscious mind is aware of water, or that the liquid gives off some form of electrical discharge.

You can probe this 5000-year-old mystery for yourself by cutting a supple Y-shaped branch from a young willow or hazel tree.

Trim it so that you have two arms roughly 50cm (about 20 inches) long. The width between the arms should be 13cm to 15cm and the stem of the Y 15cm long. Hold your branch firmly by the tips of the two arms, one in each hand, pointing the stem straight out in front of your chest, and walk slowly forward. If you have dowsing ability, the stem of the stick will start jumping up and down as you cross some hidden water supply.

Even some animals are natural water dowsers — the antelope and wild pig have curved horns and tusks, similar In shape to the hazel twig, and both these species are apparently very successful in finding hidden water supplies.

And in 1963, a South African youngster, Pieter Van Jaarsfeld, became world-famous as "the boy with X-ray eyes.” He claimed to be able to “see” water, deep underground “shimmering like green moonlight” through the soil surface. It looks as if the ladies have got the edge over men in this mysterious art. The latest Russian experiments have found that women have a success rate 40 per cent higher than men when it comes to leading a twig to water.