by Colin Wilson
Lethbridge’s theory about the magnetic field of water is obviously inadequate to explain these phenomena: to begin with a hill would presumably be less damp than the lowlying country surrounding it. But another incident described by Stephen Jenkins seems to offer a clue. In April 1973, near Acrise in Kent, Jenkins paused to take a map-reading and found, to his surprise, that he was unable to do so. His sense of direction seemed to be affected and he experienced a curious light-headedness. He walked on a few yards and the problem immediately vanished. When he went back to the previous spot, it returned again. A year later, on Yes Tor in Dartmoor, he had a very similar experience. Standing by a stone he called the Wedge, he set out to walk to the nearby Merlin Stone. His companion called him back — he was walking off in the wrong direction, south-east instead of south. He took his bearings and tried again; this time he went west. Even when the mist cleared he was still unable to orient himself. The experience puzzled him, and in the following year he took a group of three pupils to the site near Acrise and asked them to take a map-bearing — without mentioning his own previous experience. They all experienced the same disorientation, and were unable to do it.
Jenkins concluded that the solution to the riddle lay in the fact that the spot was a crossing point of two ley lines — lines of earth magnetism. The earth is, of course, a weak magnet, and there is evidence that birds and animals use these magnetic forces for homing. (The homing pigeon, for example, has a piece of tissue between its eyes which contains the mineral magnetite: if a bar magnet is strapped to the pigeon’s back, it is unable to find its way home.) There are certain areas on the earth’s surface known as magnetic vortices, and birds who fly into these lose their sense of direction and fly around helplessly. So Stephen Jenkins could be correct in believing that at the nodal point of two ley lines, his own inner compass became affected by a kind of magnetic vortex.
That human beings possess an inner compass was proved conclusively by Dr Robin Baker, a zoologist at Manchester University, in the late 1970s. Baker would blindfold his subjects, then take them from their homes and drive them through narrow, twisting lanes. At a secret destination they were asked to get out of the car and point in the direction of their homes. Most of them did so with surprising accuracy. After that some of the subjects had a bar magnet strapped to their heads while others were fitted with a brass bar that obviously had no magnetic properties (the idea being that the subject should not know which he had). They were then taken for another circuitous drive and once again asked to point towards their homes. Those with the brass bar were still remarkably accurate, but the ones with the bar magnet were completely disoriented.
Many years after his experience of the ‘phantom army’ Stephen Jenkins returned to the place at Mounts Bay where he had seen it. And as he walked through it there was once again a momentary hallucination of armed men. As before he realized that he was standing on a nodal point of ley lines. When he moved a step forward the ‘army’ vanished.
Jenkins’ theory — which has since been accepted by many ‘ley hunters’ — is that nodal points form some kind of magnetic vortex which can somehow ‘record’ events — particularly strong emotions like those associated with a battle. Orthodox science has remained suspicious of the idea of ley lines, and some sceptics have even gone to considerable trouble to prove that they cannot exist. Part of the reason for this suspicion lies in the fact that an interest in ley lines usually runs in tandem with another highly suspect activity: dowsing. The dowser, or diviner, holds in his hand a forked twig (two plastic strips tied together at one end will do equally well), grasping the end of both forks in either hand. As he walks over underground water the dowsing rod twists in his hands. Dowsing is almost universally accepted by country people who have seen it in action; the sceptics are usually scientists or official bodies (such as the United States Geological Survey) who have convinced themselves in advance that such phenomena are superstitions. But in the 1960s a series of impeccably designed experiments by Dr Zaboj V. Harvalik, a professional physicist and adviser to the US Army, finally placed dowsing on an unshakeable scientific basis.
Intrigued by dowsers in his native Czechoslovakia, Harvalik continued his researches when he became a physics teacher at the University of Missouri. One of the first things he noticed was that his dowsing rod would always react to an electric wire on the ground: this suggested that dowsing was basically electrical. Next he drove two lengths of water-pipe vertically into the ground, separated by a distance of sixty feet, and connected their exposed ends to a powerful battery. When he switched on the current his dowsing rod responded immediately. He then began to practise on friends and discovered that all of them could dowse provided the current was high enough — above 20 milliamps. The remaining 20 per cent proved to be even better dowsers who could detect a current as low as 2 milliamps — some even responded to a half milliamp. And most people improved steadily with practice. He also found that dowsing ability was improved if the dowser drank a few tumblers of water before he began, and made the fascinating discovery that people who seemed to possess no dowsing ability would suddenly begin to dowse after half a tumbler of whisky: the alcohol relaxed them and thus enabled them to ‘tune in’.
Harvalik’s conclusion was that the human body is itself a magnetic detector — for primitive man it must have been a matter of life and death to locate underground springs, and Australian aborigines can still ‘sense’ water even without the aid of a dowsing rod — and that some part of the body picks up the change in magnetic gradient and passes the information on to the brain, which in turn causes the muscles to convulse, twisting the rod. Professor Yves Rocard of the Sorbonne had already performed experiments in 1962 which showed that weak changes in the earth’s magnetic field produced changes in the dowser’s muscles. Now Harvalik performed similar experiments with a German master dowser, Wilhelm de Boer — which satisfied him that the ‘organ’ that detects water is the group of glands known as the adrenals, just above the kidneys. (These are the glands that flood us with adrenalin when we experience a shock.) But a strip of aluminium foil wound around the head just above the ears also blocked all dowsing signals; so did a single square of aluminium foil pasted in the centre of the forehead.
De Boer was able to detect incredibly small signals — a mere thousandth of a milliamp. And working with de Boer confirmed something Harvalik had always suspected — that dowsers can select the signals they want to ‘tune’ into. De Boer could even detect various radio stations which broadcast on different frequencies. Harvalik would tell him which frequency to look for, and de Boer would turn round slowly until he was facing the direction of the radio station. Then Harvalik would check his accuracy by turning a portable radio in that direction.
The fact that dowsers can select what they want to ‘pick up’ was certainly one of the most important observations of all. If a dowser is looking for underground minerals, he can make his dowsing rod ignore water. He can even detect different articles placed under a carpet — coins, matches and so on — merely by deciding what he is looking for. This sounds amazing enough, yet it is no more remarkable than our ability to listen to a conversation in a crowded bar. In this respect the dowser’s inbuilt electromagnetic detector is immensely superior to the best magnetometers built in laboratories, for they pick up every signal from underground water and power lines to human brainwaves. The dowser can decide which signal he wants to detect.
The invention of a magnetometer sensitive enough to detect brainwaves — between .5 and 50 Hz — suggested to Harvalik that a good dowser ought to be able to detect brain rhythms. He would stand with his back to a screen in his garden with earplugs in his ears, and ask people to walk towards him from the other side of the screen. His dowsing rod revealed their presence when they were ten feet away. When he asked them to think ‘exciting’ thoughts — for example, about sex — he could detect them at twenty feet. Harvalik’s experiment offers a possible explanation of how telepathy functions. It certainly
seems to explain why so many of us feel uncomfortable when someone stares at the back of our heads, and why women can often detect the gaze of a sexually interested male even when he is walking behind them.
Perhaps the most impressive thing to emerge from Harvalik’s investigations was the remarkable accuracy of which a dowser is capable. Harvalik could not only fix the direction of a reservoir from many miles but could even state how many feet of water were in it. Christopher Bird* tells how Harvalik was able to point out the direction of a reservoir in Sydney, Australia and accurately estimate its distance as 12.6 miles. The water-board engineer asked him if he could tell him how deep it was: Harvalik said sixty-eight feet. The engineer checked his booklet and told Harvalik that he was fairly close: the actual depth was seventy-five feet. But when they visited the reservoir the following day Harvalik was found to be correct: the water level had dropped by seven feet.
Clearly our ability to ‘read’ the information that surrounds us is far greater than we normally assume (although it would certainly not have surprised Thomson Jay Hudson). T. C. Lethbridge had made the same discovery when he moved to Devon in 1957 and began a series of experiments with a pendulum (which many dowsers prefer to the usual forked twig). Most pendulum dowsers use a fairly heavy weight on a short piece of string (so that it is not unduly affected by wind). Lethbridge decided it might be more interesting to use a long piece of string — wound round a pencil, so that its length could be varied — and to see whether different substances would cause it to react at different lengths. He began by placing a silver dish on the floor and suspending his pendulum above it. When the length of the string reached twenty-two inches, the pendulum stopped swinging back and forth and went into a circular motion. Lethbridge assumed this to mean that the ‘rate’ for silver was twenty-two inches — and went on to detect a tiny piece of buried silver in the courtyard of his house. It was not even necessary to stand above the silver. He could stand with the pendulum in his hand and the other arm outstretched in front of him, slowly moving in an arc. When the pendulum started to swing in a circle he noted the direction of the pointing finger, then went and stood somewhere else and repeated the procedure. Where the resulting two lines crossed he dug down, and usually found what he was looking for. He noted that each substance seemed to register at a precise rate: carbon at twelve inches, tin at twenty-eight, copper at thirty and a half, grass at sixteen, apples at eighteen, elm at twenty-three. It even responded to abstractions such as sex, anger, evolution, male and female. (These had to be clearly visualized.) He and his wife Mina tried picking up stones and throwing them against a wall, then testing the stones with a pendulum: it was able to detect which stones had been thrown by each of them by its male or female response.
Lethbridge was convinced that he had discovered a fundamental secret of nature — that everything has its own ‘rate’. Harvalik would undoubtedly treat this assertion with scepticism. He discovered that dowsers can decide in advance how they want the pendulum to respond: they can ‘programme’ it to swing back and forth for ‘No’ and in a circle for ‘Yes’, or vice versa: they can ‘programme’ the forked twig to twist up or down as preferred. So Lethbridge’s ‘rates’ may have been arbitrary, ‘programmed’ by his unconscious mind. Yet this is obviously a minor point. What matters is that the pendulum can detect an astonishing range of information that would normally be undetectable by our senses. And if Harvalik is correct, it does this through the body’s response to incredibly small magnetic gradients.
Yet even Harvalik had to admit that his ‘magnetic theory’ had its limitations. His researches soon brought him into contact with dowsers who claimed to be able to detect water just as well by dangling their pendulum over a map: he not only found their claims to be true, but discovered that he could do it himself. A map dowser can dowse not only for water but also for oil and coal and other substances — most large mineral combines have one on their payroll. The psychic Uri Geller has become a multi-millionaire by dowsing for oil and mineral companies, and the fact that he is paid by results demonstrates clearly that his results are real. Moreover a good dowser can use his pendulum to obtain other kinds of information. In 1960 a Swiss dowser named Edgar Devaux was asked to help trace a missing housewife. He held his pendulum over a photograph of the woman and announced that she was dead — his pendulum had swung from north-east to south-west. Then, using a map of Basel, he traced a line along the river and made a cross. ‘She is there.’ Divers went down at the spot indicated and one of them touched the body: as he disturbed it, it floated away. Devaux walked along the towpath, tracing its progress as it floated down the river, but had to abandon the chase when houses made it impossible to continue. A few days later, however, the corpse was found at the barrage where the water was sieved before turning the turbines of a power station.*
But although map dowsing defies all attempts to explain it in terms of magnetic fields, it is no more startling than Eileen Garrett’s ability to detect a missing man from a fragment of his shirt. The major difference is that Eileen Garrett somehow acquired ‘direct access’ to information by using her ability to ‘withdraw’ into a clairvoyant state, while Devaux gained his information by handling a photograph (and a slipper provided by the woman’s sister) and then ‘questioning’ his pendulum. Both cases suggest that we are living in an ‘information universe’; the difference lies in the manner of gaining access to the information.
Let us pause to survey this bewildering profusion of data.
The notion that we are living in an ‘information universe’ — a universe in which everything that has ever happened is ‘on record’ — is certainly a strange one, but it cannot be dismissed as unscientific. We now know that whole pages of information can be condensed on to a microdot and that a long message can be compressed and transmitted in one supersonic ‘beep’. Moreover we know that the whole rich sound of an orchestra can somehow be captured by a wavy line on a plastic disc. And this in itself seems an absurdity. We know that Edison first recorded sound by speaking into a trumpet with a needle attached to its narrow end and allowing the needle to make a mark on a revolving drum covered with tinfoil. Then he put the needle back to the beginning of the scratch and turned the crank: his own voice came out of the trumpet reciting ‘Mary had a little lamb’. That sounds straightforward enough, for a voice is a fairly simple sound. But how can the same ‘scratch’ record all the instruments of the orchestra? — surely you would need a different scratch for each one?
But at least this analogy makes us aware that there is nothing illogical about the notion of events being ‘recorded’ on matter. If tinfoil can record Edison’s voice with the aid of a few vibrations, then the walls of a house may well be able to record some tragedy that has taken place there by means of emotional ‘vibrations’. And if Joan Forman is correct in believing that these vibrations are of the same frequency as our brainwaves, then each of us has a ‘gramophone’ to play back the ‘time-recordings’.
Harvalik’s experiments place all this on a commonsense foundation. They demonstrate that the human body is, among other things, a complicated electronic device for measuring energy. Of course we already know that our ears detect sound waves and our eyes detect light waves. But Harvalik demonstrated that our bodies can also detect radio waves far below the red end of the spectrum, and radioactivity, which is far above the violet end. It is true that Caspar Hauser was able to see heat waves, and that Yuliya Vorobyeva can apparently see X-rays. Even master dowser Wilhelm de Boer cannot actually see radio waves and gamma rays. But his divining rod can detect them, which is the next best thing.
Equally important is Harvalik’s demonstration that the dowser can ‘programme’ himself to select the signals he is interested in — so that de Boer could trace the Washington radio station on 570 kc then turn his attention to some other radio or TV station broadcasting on a different wavelength. Of course de Boer could only pinpoint the direction of the broadcast. But since we know that dowsers can improve wi
th practice there is obviously no reason why he should not eventually be able to listen in to the programmes. The same applies to Harvalik’s discovery that he could detect the brainwaves of people who walked towards him across a lawn. With a great deal more practice, there seems to be no logical reason why he should not be able to detect what they are thinking about.
I have myself taken part in a demonstration that involved a kind of telepathy. In 1972 I was researching the dowsing abilities of the ‘psychic’ Robert Leftwich. In one experiment I held the dowsing rod while Leftwich stood with his back towards me; I was then ordered to walk forward down my drive. The aim was to detect an underground water-main: I knew its position but Leftwich didn’t. As I walked over the pipe, my dowsing rod twisted in my hands and Leftwich shouted, ‘Stop, you’re on it.’ He had somehow picked up the signal from my brain. Harvalik’s experiments place these observations on a scientific basis. We now know that nothing particularly ‘occult’ was taking place — merely the detection of magnetic gradients by the piece of electronic apparatus known as the human body. Then could this not also apply to Buchanan’s psychometry’?
While I was engaged on the writing of the present chapter, my wife took two guests to look at the old gaol in Bodmin, which is open to the public. My wife is an excellent dowser; the other two were novices. There were two places in the gaol where even the novices obtained a powerful response from the rods: the condemned cell and the execution shed. All three sensed an unpleasant atmosphere in these places while they were dowsing. It is possible of course that the rods may have been responding to underground water, and that the unpleasant atmosphere was pure imagination. But if we can accept the psychometric hypothesis then there is obviously an alternative explanation: the walls of the condemned cell and the execution shed have ‘recorded’ a great deal of human anguish over the centuries. The narrow range of our everyday left-brain consciousness prevents us from becoming aware of these ‘recordings’. But the right brain — Hudson’s subjective mind — is a ‘record-player’ that can ‘play back’ these ‘recordings’, and even though it is not capable of communicating its knowledge to the objective mind it can register the information through the medium of the dowsing rod, causing the muscles to convulse.