Updated 7 a.m. Wednesday Most of the major water companies in the United Kingdom use dowsing rods — a folk magic practice discredited by science — to find underwater pipes, according to an Oxford Ph.D ...

Indeed, the dowsing rod's movement has been attributed to everything from electromagnetic forces to extra-sensory perception. William Carpenter, the famed 19th-century physiologist and naturalist, ...

So how did I end up with a city employee traipsing across my front yard with divining rods on a recent evening, searching for underground water? The answer begins with a boneheaded blunder on my part.

Dowsing — the finding of underground water with a divining rod — is one of those esoteric arts you can see but still not quite believe, like yoga or mind reading. It has its violent partisans — the ...

Bill Getz is a water dowser from Schoharie County who uses two types of divining rods to attempt to locate ground water. Bill Getz was four years old when he was first told he had a gift for ...

Thames Water and Severn Trent Water are still use dowsing rods to detect leaks despite scientific studies showing that the method is ineffective. A 2017 investigation found that 10 out of 12 water ...

Leroy Bull was about 12 the first time he dowsed. He and his cousins were at a family reunion in Watertown, NY, and his grandfather, a dairy farmer and water dowser, took them all outside, handed them ...

Rob Thompson drives a stake into the ground to indicate a possible water well site, while his wife, Robyne, notes the location while dowsing for water at a Napa Valley vineyard in Calistoga, Calif., ...