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Dowsing is a particular practice claiming to be able to discover underground water, metals and objects that don't show any trace of their presence on the surface.
This is a very ancient practice, once used for divination purposes in sacred ceremonies in which a divinity was alleged to reveal to its followers the presence of water as reward for their devotion.

As we know it today, dowsing could have had its origin in Germany during the XV century and it was used to search metals, despite this practice was considered as satanic in the Middle Ages and condemned later also by the Jesuits in the XVII and XVIII centuries.

Also recently, dowsing was "seriously" used in Vietnam by American soldiers during the late 1960's, trying to find the presence of buried mines, weapons and the tunnels that allowed the Viet-cong to hide themselves and resist, but also this system couldn't avoid a final defeat for the Americans.

People practicing dowsing use wood sticks, pendulums or also nothing but their own hands to feel particular vibrations, when getting close these targets. When looking for metallic objects, the dowsing tools would be a sort of "natural metal-detectors" but, differently from the electronic instruments, they are not based on the detection of a precise physical phenomenon.

Personally, I'm very sceptical about dowsing, especially, after the little research made to write this article. I consider it a sort of skilful trick performed by persons who, in the simplest cases, pretend to ignore where water or metals are buried and, instead, know very well the territory that is the object of their researches or, at least, the type of territory (made of limestone, sandy, clay or volcanic rocks) and its likelihood to hide water underground.
Dowsers, in fact, have never revealed an extra-sensorial sensibility to magnetic fields, electric currents from the ground or other physical phenomena.

Furthermore, who believes in dowsing commits a mistake similar to that made believing in fortune tellers' predictions; they give more importance to the positive predictions because impressed by them, clearly possible, for chance of for "hidden" knowledge, forgetting or ignoring those negative or false. This is the ancient art to transform a chance success into a constant and systematic one, due to alleged "supernatural" faculties.

In the last years, two important tests were performed both in Germany, on the dowsing ability of many persons claiming to have this faculty.

- The Munich test.

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