Divine Business

I have been exposed to dowserswho floated around the mining exploration business and am certainly sympatheticto their efforts and claims.  Asmentioned here, most simply fail to cut it, but we do have exceptions as welldescribed here that are truly uncanny.  Suchsuccess as I have seen and as described here is statistically impossible.

Ore bodies are not found so much as followed.  The only break I have seen in that has beenthrough dowsers.  This story about the3000 acre failure been turned into a 90% drilling success is a demonstration ofimpossibility that a successful dowser repeats again and again.

I have seen at least one blindore body discovered through no more than map dowsing, and if that is notconfounding, then what is?  A chance in amillion fell to a chance in ten.

Divine Business

An old-school dowser plies his trade

by Sam Western, from High Country News

May-June 2011

http://www.utne.com/Great-Writing/Divine-Business-Dowsing-Divining-Rod-Montana.aspx

Bozeman, Montana’s Vernon G. Bandy takes a humble pleasure inpoking holes in hydrologists’ assumptions. Those who study the ways of aquifersand groundwater declare that you can sink a drill bit just about anywhere inthe earth and find water. “Maybe,” says Bandy, flicking one of the Benson andHedges cigarettes he sneaks while he’s driving. “But what kind of water? Hard?Soft? Maybe laced with arsenic. How much water? And at $32 per foot in drillingcosts, just how deep do you want to go to prove your scientific theory?”

Bandy is a dowser who plies the inscrutable art of finding objects andliquids with a divining rod or stick. He says he can locate, with somethingapproaching regularity, just about anything—water, gold, drugs, oil, deadbodies—with his nylon dowsing rods. Today, he’s headed to dowse a well sixmiles west of Rapelje, a ranching community in south central Montana. “This is tough country fordowsing,” he observes. “Lot of bad water.Sulfides. Sodium and salt.”

After we pull into a pasture that is being transformed into a homesite,Bandy heads to the hatch of his trusty Buick SUV (he puts 35,000 miles on itannually) and straps on an equipment belt loaded with flagging, spray cans,hammer, and five sizes of rods. He developed these in conjunction with the lateCharlie Bowman, a professor of agricultural engineering at Montana State University who claimeddowsing rods helped him locate perch while he was ice-fishing.

Gear clacking, Bandy takes out his smallest rod and walks a straightline; when he feels the rod pull to earth, Bandy marks the spot with a flag. Hecontinues walking until the end of the rod rises. He takes out another flag andmarks the width of what he calls the water “vein.” Then, using a stouter rod(if one of his bigger rods pulls hard, it means more water), he flags the veinuntil he’s found the area of greatest concentration of what he calls “heavywater,” a term that would tickle any nuclear physicist. There, he hammers in apiece of rebar, which he sprays at the bottom with orange and at the top withblue: his trademark.

What comes next addles the mind.

Using his smallest rod, Bandy stands over the newly marked well, silently,for perhaps a minute, his jaw trembling slightly and lips moving. He is talkingto the stick, measuring depth and volume. The dowsing rod rises and falls likesome priapic oracle. There is no scientific evidence supporting Bandy’s abilityto find anything by dowsing. Still, he has kept records (which he’ll show toanyone) that he says support his claim to have dowsed over 4,000 water wellswith 90 percent accuracy, and hundreds of gas and oil wells. He says he’sroughly 70 percent accurate on depth and volume.

Just ask Dale Price. In the 1950s and 1960s, Price’s fatherpin-cushioned his 3,000-acre wheat farm looking for water. Eventually, he dugup a piece of damp ground with a backhoe, sunk in a perforated piece ofculvert, and siphoned the water half a mile through a hose to his house.Price’s mother wouldn’t drink it.

Price inherited the farm and wanted to build houses on a portion of theland. Water, however, remained a problem. In 1992 Price hired Bandy, who dowsed60 wells. Thus far, Price has drilled and hit good water at acceptable rates offlow in 18 out of 20 wells. In essence, a dryland wheat farm has beentransformed into a parcel of ground with 18 possible homesites.

Bandy takes his powers in stride. He eats fried food with impunity,favors lots of sugar, has no fear of excess coffee, and is a deacon in thePresbyterian church of Bozeman.Despite being skinny and wiry, Bandy has the inner thermostat of a polar bear.He’s been seen happily dowsing in shirtsleeves in the midst of a snowstorm.

He was born in 1931, in Ekalaka, Montana. His father held Montana well-driller’slicense number eight. Bandy worked with his father during the summer in Carterand Powder River counties—dry places wherewells made the difference between survival and being starved out.

Bandy is devoted to protocol and routine. He never lays his stick onthe ground. The back of his SUV is laid out like an engineer’s closet,including records from previous dowsings, tools, and long cloth bags containingvarious rods. Even some drillers, notoriously dismissive of dowsers, concedeBandy’s skills. Troy Hauser of Red Dragon Drilling in Manhattan, Montana, sayshe’s worked around dowsers most of his life “and wouldn’t give a dime for adozen of them.” Except Vern, he says. “Does he scare the hell out of you? Hescares the hell out of me.”

Excerpted from the November 22, 2010, issue of High Country News,a bimonthly magazine that covers the issues and stories that define theAmerican West. www.hcn.org 

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