
By: Fredric Rice
Re: German dowsing study

The fragment of the german study on dowsing which was posted here isn't the
full story.  As is typical of claims of the paranormal which are purported to
find success, proper study of the materials found the claimants, "Sadly
mistaken."

    Enright, James T.  "Water Dowsing: The 'Scheunen' Experiments."
    Naturwissenschaften 82:360-369, 1995.

    Under a program to investigate "unconventional methods of cancer
    control," the German government sponsored a large-scale
    experimental investigation of water dowsing, conducted by two
    physicists from universities in Munich.  This was no doubt the
    largest carful study of its kind eer undertaken, with some
    10,000 individual tests using some 500 dowsers.  The central
    element in the research involved double-blind tests of whether
    some 50 selected dowsers could correctly locate a hidden, movable
    water pipe from a distance of 4 tio 5 yards.

    At the end of the p[roject (1990), the researchers concluded
    that the reality of the skill of some of the dowsers had been
    established beyond reasonable doubt, a conclusion widely reported
    in the German press.

    Enright's article described a re-examination of the data
    underlying that interpretation.  This analysis demonstrates that
    even the most "skillful" of the dowsers were unable to perform
    reproducibly at levgels above chance.  Most of them cound have
    done better, on average, just by always choosing a location
    exactly in the middle of the test line.

So much for that paranormal claim.

