Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

I tried dowsing as a youngster on the recommendation of the type of book as I mentioned earlier...but then I also tried ventriloquism and magic tricks.
I have a fair record of success just finding lost items (keys, rings etc) through logic, quite often retracing steps as you say. eg keys lost on a large playing field...I sat on a park bench and imagined what the key owner would have done.....hot day coat taken off...not put on the ground..so the only logical place was the horse trough(now used as a decorative planter)...there were the keys down the gap between the soil and the trough sides....guy was well impressed...and I could've quite easily pretended possessing abilities...but I didn't, I'm more the Conan-Doyle approach rather than the Von Daniken
If some stones ripped from the earth and shaped to man's designs and set in the ground can throw people about....why don't some natural paving flags do this too.."sensitive special power people" wouldn't be able to walk down streets..nor would they be able to lean on walls of old buildings etc...without being slung about like rag-dolls.There is a stock answer...but it is as convincing as the "3%" argument. I remain a doubter because of the selectiveness of the "phenomenom".

being animals, still had the ability to 'feel' this where man had now lost it. I think we all have to admit to finding peace and tranquility in/on certain places/spots and return to them in momemts of stress or uncertainty in our lives.

Most of the discoveries/advances in human history weren’t achieved through evidence; there was a suspicion, if not a manifestation, that something was so, which in turn lead to it being studied and practiced until the reasons why it was so were understood. Some thing's are still not understood, though that doesn't invalidate their efficacy. Acupuncture being a good example - laughed at 20-30 years ago but now (tentatively) endorsed by the NHS and the World Health Organization (though how it works is still not understood).

It’s the capacity for us to leap from what might be to what is, and to then demonstrate how, which is a human quality worth cherishing. Closed minds are like houses with closed doors and shuttered windows - their inhabitants living in a world where the only consolation is that it’s so dull in there that there’s never any danger of a surprise (or a rethink). What was it that the ‘shiftless, roving and magotie-headed’ John Aubrey said about Stonehenge?

“I have brought (them) from an inner darkness to a thin mist.”

So here’s to the shiftless, roving, magotie-headed dowsers, antiquarians (modern or otherwise), time travellers and quantum physicists everywhere; if they bring us from an inner darkness to even a thin mist so much the better :-)

Acupuncture is not an effective cure or it would be used widely...it works for a few people perhaps in the same way a placebo works for a few people....nobody knows how something with no medicinal properties works on someone because they have been told it will work(...like the ads say, "Nothing works more effectively on headaches than" ..to which Spike Milligan famously said, "Thats why I use nothing to cure my headaches!")

There is IMO a world of difference between being cured of an ailment and proclaiming that rocks fling certain people across fields because of the power surges which these people claim to be able to detect...especially as these things happen sans witnesses.....The film Mystery Men..had a character who could turn himself invisible but only when no-one was watching him, I find claimants of special powers to be like this. Mind you there was a dowser of certain fame filmed for a news programme...he used to get "electric shocks" from stones (almost any standing stone he chose) though no-one else present got so much as frostbite from keeping their hands on the stones for too long....when this "special person" proceeded to touch the stone he started jittering and shaking in a manner he assumed was symptomatic of an electric shock (I can only assume he had never had a real electric shock or had watched too many Tom & Jerry cartoons...the way he carried on)...however when the reporter touched him...or should I say once he realised the reporter had touched him, in an effort to see if he too would be affected(he wasn't)..the remarkable dowser stopped his cavortings claiming that he had been earthed. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of physics would know that if the reporter had earthed him the electricity would have had to travel through the reporter's body, the same goes for a modicum of medical knowledge someone to have had an electric shock of such strength that "stuck" his hands to the rock....he would need a medical check-up to ensure a cardiac arrhythmia had not affected him.
So I might be an awkward bugger...but I need proof that something is before I will put my name to it....however I don't need proof something isn't to disbelieve it.....

Fair comment...but no dowser respects being doubted or the right to doubt them.

No it can't. It's cobblers.
G x