Dowsing for corpses

Back when I was teaching, I ran into students with a lot of fringe-y beliefs, or at least unscientific ones.  But if you had to pick which one students were the most reluctant to abandon, I bet you'd never guess.

Dowsing.

Dowsing, also called water-witching, is the belief that you can use a forked stick (more modern dowsers use a pair of metal rods on a swivel) to locate stuff.  It started out being used to find underground water for a well (thus the appellation "water-witching"), but has since progressed (or regressed?  Guess it depends upon your viewpoint) to being used to find all sorts of things, including -- I kid you not -- marijuana in kids' lockers in a high school.

"But it works!" students said, when I told them there was no scientific basis for it whatsoever.  "My dad hired a guy to come tell us where to dig our well, and we hit water at only thirty feet down!"

Yeah, okay.  But this is upstate New York, one of the cloudiest, rainiest climates in the United States.  Unless you're standing on an outcropping of bedrock, there's gonna be groundwater underneath you.  In fact, only about twenty miles from here, there's a hillside with a natural artesian spring -- someone put a pipe into it, and people stop and fill up water bottles from the clear water gushing out.  So it's entirely unsurprising that you hit water where the dowsing guy indicated.  You'll hit water pretty much anywhere around here if you dig down a ways.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What's funniest are the quasi-scientific explanations the dowsers give as to why it (allegedly) works.  An example is that you should always make your dowsing rod from a willow branch, because willows grow near water, so the wood remains attracted to it.  Even though I'm yet to see how a dead branch could respond that way.  Or any way, honestly.

Given that it's dead.

Every scientifically-valid study of dowsing has resulted in zero evidence that it works.  This doesn't mean the dowsers are deliberately cheating; they may honestly think the stick is moving on its own.  This is called the ideomotor effect, where small movements made unconsciously by the practitioner convince him/her (and the audience) that something real, and supernatural, is going on.  (The same phenomenon almost certainly accounts for spiritualist claims like Ouija board divination and table-turning.)

But despite these sorts of arguments, I fear that I convinced few students to change their beliefs.  "I saw it happen!" is a remarkably powerful mindset, even once you accept that we're all prone to biases, and that we're all easily fooled when it comes to something we want to believe.

So this is why I was unsurprised but disheartened to read an article from Mother Jones sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  In it, we read about one Arpad Vass, a guy who believes that you can use dowsing rods...

... to find dead bodies.

This would just be another goofy belief, and heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, but he has somehow convinced the people who run the National Forensic Academy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that his technique is scientifically sound.  He has some kind of cockeyed explanation of how it works -- that the effect is due to piezoelectricity, a phenomenon where certain crystalline substances develop a charge when they're subjected to mechanical stress.  Piezoelectricity is real enough; it's the basis of quartz watches, inkjet printing, and electric guitar pickups.  But even if decomposing bone can generate some net static charge, it would leak away into the soil it's buried in -- there's no mechanism by which it could exert a pull on some bent wires several meters away.  (Actually, Vass claims he's successfully found corpses this way from a hundred meters away.  If the static charge is that high, you shouldn't need a dowsing rod to detect it -- a plain old boring volt meter would work.  Funny how that never happens.)

And, of course, there's the problem that it doesn't work for everyone.  Vass has an answer for that, too.  "If people don’t have the right voltage, it’s not going to work," he says.  "Everything in the universe vibrates at a very specific frequency.  Gold has a gold frequency, silver has a silver frequency, and your DNA has your frequency."

I guess bullshit has a specific frequency, too.

The problem is that Vass isn't just playing around, or doing something that isn't a huge deal if it doesn't work (like finding a well drilling site).  This is injecting pseudoscience into police investigation.  And recently, he's gone one step further; he has invented, he said, a "quantum oscillator" that supposedly picks up a person's "frequency" from something like a hair sample or fingernail clippings, and then beams that frequency out, and it will somehow interact with the person (or his/her corpse), and send back a signal to the device...

... from up to 120 kilometers away.

I was encouraged by the fact that the Mother Jones article came down fairly solidly on the side of the scientists, stating unequivocally that there is no evidence that any form of dowsing works.  They also highlighted the human side of this; Randy Shrewsberry, founder of the nonprofit Criminal Justice Training Reform Institute, was quoted as saying "Law enforcement regularly accepts the flaws of these practices despite the life-altering impacts that can occur when they’re wrong."  In one Virginia case, a man was convicted of murder even though no body of the victim was found -- in part, because of testimony from Vass that his device had found the victim's "frequency" in eight locations, indicating that her body had been dismembered.

Eric Bartelink, professor of anthropology at the University of California - Chico and former president of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, was unequivocal.  "Vass is operating these services that are not scientifically valid.  It’s very misleading to families and law enforcement."

So at least some prominent voices in the field are speaking up to support the findings of every scientific study ever done on the practice of dowsing.  I'm still appalled that a forensic training academy has somehow been convinced to take Vass and his nonsense seriously; I guess being highly educated isn't necessarily an immunization against confirmation bias.  As for me, I'm calling bullshit on the whole practice.

Beam that into your "quantum oscillator," buddy.

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Dowsing, SLIders, and Portuguese Water Dogs

I find that one of the most useful questions to ask someone who makes an outlandish claim is, "How could that possibly work?"

I bring this up in part because of a discussion I had with a student over the practice of dowsing.  For those of you who don't know what this is, dowsing (also known as "water-witching") is the use of a forked stick, generally by a "sensitive," to find underground water.  Supposedly the stick will give a sharp downward pull if there's a source of water suitable for well-drilling underneath where you're standing.  I have found that this is the one woo-woo claim that elicits the most support when it comes up in my Critical Thinking classes -- almost every one of my students knows at least one person who will vouch for its truth.

Of course, the fact is, in upstate New York there's almost nowhere you could drill around here and not hit water, sooner or later, and most of the groundwater is pretty clean.  So dowsing would be a pretty safe proposition nearly everywhere.  But so, of course, would claiming that your dog was a "sensitive," and leading him around on a leash until he gets bored and sits down, and then drilling there because a source of underground water exerts a magnetic attraction on your dog's butt.

I hear that Portuguese Water Dogs are an especially good choice for this.

Be that as it may, I said to my student, "How could this possibly work?"  Of course, she had no ready answer for this, and neither does anyone else, but this hasn't stopped people from making one up -- that the Earth's "energies" interact with the "psychic fields" of the dowser's mind, causing the stick to move downwards.  One website even claimed that because willow trees like to grow near water, willow wood works the best for dowsing rods.  (And you laughed at my Portuguese Water Dog claim.   Please explain to me how the "willow wood" claim is any different.)

The demand of "show me the mechanism" is a pretty good first-order test for a lot of these claims, such as the recent spate of stories about people called SLIders (and we're not referring to the 90s science fiction TV series here).  SLIders are people who exhibit Street Light Interference -- street lights go off, or on, or flicker, when they walk past.  Naysayers, of course, claim this is just Dart-Thrower's Bias -- the tendency of the human mind to notice and remember oddities (times that the street light went off as you passed) and ignore all of the background noise (times that the street lights stayed on).  Believers aren't buying it, and claim that the "electrical output of the brain" is interfering with the electrical flow in the street light.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

How the electrical activity of the brain -- which, according to The Physics Factbook, runs at a total energy consumption rate of 20 to 40 Watts, or slightly less than a single typical incandescent light bulb -- could affect the activity of a 200 Watt high-pressure sodium vapor lamp running on conventional electrical current forty feet away, is never explained.  Any demand for a plausible mechanism quickly descends into the same kind of "sensitive psychic field" baloney that comes up with similar requests vis-à-vis dowsing.

The phenomenon has been looked at in the laboratory, and no evidence supporting it has ever been found.  The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has a good summary of the research, and the writer, Massimo Polidoro, concludes, "Science has never confirmed that the human mind can cause physical effects at a distance, which is what seems to be occurring in SLI...  (T)his appears to be a phenomenon that just happens at random and is not produced by one willing for it to happen."

This, of course, doesn't discourage die-hard SLIders from thinking they're doing something unusual, which makes you wonder why they don't constantly short out computers, televisions, cellphones, iPods, and so on.  You'd think that if they can affect something as simple, and powerful, as a street light, frying a laptop would be a relative cinch.  Yet even some of the pro-SLIder sites I looked at admitted that the effect had "proven difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting."

Yup, I'll just bet it is.  In any case, here's another nice thing to add to your skeptical toolkit -- "show me the mechanism."  If you think something weird is going on, you'd better have a plausible explanation for it that doesn't fly in the face of verified science.  And that goes double for all of you Portuguese Water Dogs.

Dowsing for dead people

Suppose you were walking in the woods, and suddenly, you stumbled on a root, and fell flat on your face.  And while you were lying on your belly, trying to regain your breath and your dignity, you noticed that right in front of your eyes was a twenty-dollar bill that someone had dropped.

You might decide that your bad luck in tripping over a tree root had been cancelled out by the good luck of now being twenty dollars richer.  You might, on the other hand, attribute it to complete chance and the chaotic nature of the universe, where sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and the whole thing appears to be a big zero-sum game.

What I can almost guarantee you wouldn't do is decide that the money had exerted a magical gravitational attraction toward your face, and had caused you to fall.

I bring this up because of a maddening article in the Kent and Sussex Courier that tells of a fortuitous archaeological discovery in the town of Tunbridge Wells.  Some "scientists," we are told, were poking around Calverley Grounds, a local park, and found a mass burial site (probably a "plague pit" from the bubonic plague epidemic of 1660), and also the site of a skirmish between the Normans and the Saxons.

Cool stuff.  But I haven't told you yet how they found it.

By "dowsing."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yes, dowsing, that time-honored tradition of holding metal rods or tree branches in your hands, and imagining that aquifers (or mineral deposits or burial sites or damn near anything) could somehow pull on them and alert you to their presence.  How on earth could that work, you might ask?  Well, an article by Stephen Wagner gives us the following definitive answer:

The quick answer is that no one really knows - not even experienced dowsers. Some theorize there is a psychic connection established between the dowser and the sought object. All things, living and inanimate, the theory suggests, possess an energy force. The dowser, by concentrating on the hidden object, is somehow able to tune in to the energy force or "vibration" of the object which, in turn, forces the dowsing rod or stick to move. The dowsing tool may act as a kind of amplifier or antenna for tuning into the energy.

Righty-o.  An "energy force."  That, strangely, is completely undetectable except to a dude holding a tree branch.

Be that as it may, there is both an American and a British Dowsing Society.  People take this stuff seriously.  I find that when I mention dowsing in my Critical Thinking classes -- in the context of its being pseudoscience, and a fine example of the ideomotor effect -- I find that it arouses hostility on almost the level of evolution and climate change.

"My dad hired a dowser when we were trying to find a place to dig our well," I'll be told, "and when we dug where the dowser told us to, we hit water!"

It's anecdote vs. data again, because however fortunate you were to find water, repeated controlled studies of people who self-identify as being highly successful dowsers have generated results consistent with random chance.

But back to our intrepid British skeleton-finders.  They have no doubt that their discovery was made because of their little magic rods.  One of the "scientists," Don Hocking, said:

The body is sensitive to magnetic fields and the kinds we respond to in this regard are called diamagnetic fields and paramagnetic fields and the body responds autonomously to the presence of these fields and particularly to discontinuities in fields where you get a step or a change in direction or change in magnitude.  We are the equipment.  The human body is the equipment and it responds and we use something to indicate that the body has responded and in our case we tend to use rods which swing when the body responds to the fields.  Then we mark what we have found and go through the whole process, marking everything as we go and build up a picture of what there may be underneath.

Which might win some kind of award for pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.  And if you're curious about what the terms he's using actually mean, check out the Wikipedia article about diamagnetism and paramagnetism, wherein we learn that (1) all materials are diamagnetic, and that it's only a significant force in superconductors, and (2) paramagnetism is so weak that it can "only be measured by a sensitive analytical balance."

But enough with the science-y vocabulary, let's think about the results.  Even Hocking admitted that he was messing about in a part of the world where you pretty much can't stick a shovel in the ground without hitting a medieval grave site:

We found lots of grave sites and we found one mass grave or ‘plague pit’.  This is a place where the bodies of those who died of the plague were dumped.  I am not sure what plague it was but the main plague was about 1660.  It’s not very surprising.  There must have been a lot around.  The plague took out half the population.

Uh-huh.  So anywhere I dig, I might hit a burial site.  No magic rods required.

I think what bothers me most about this is not that some credulous amateur archaeologists think they're getting mystical information from the Earth, it's that the whole thing was treated seriously by a news outlet.  Woo-woos, after all, will be woo-woos, and they'll continue to play with their Tarot cards and crystal pendulums and metal rods.

But that doesn't mean that we need to give them undeserved credibility by acting if their fantasies are real.