In a review of the July 1955 edition of the French dowsing journal,  La Radiesthesie pour Tous, there appeared a technique to recover stolen goods. It is a good example of the reach of dowsing applications attempted by European dowsers in contrast to their British counterparts at that time (and perhaps even today).

http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No89_1955_p304.pdf

The review is brief, but it appeared to work by planting a in the mind of the thief, the idea to return the articles which they had stolen. The account contains some terms which might be difficult for the modern treader to decipher.

By “regulating” the pendulum, I believe the author is referring to adjusting the length of the pendulum string until a reaction was obtained. This was a technique common at this time, each object sought had a characteristic pendulum length.  

There is a reference to “drawings which heal”. There is no previous reference to this term in the review, but it appears that the method involved using the pendulum to create a pattern on paper, which would then act as a dowsing sample. This seems to be a kind of ritual, perhaps it better aided the dowser to focus in on the  target (or thief in this case).

The drawing is then “magnetised”, which reflects the commonly held idea that the dowsing reaction was due to some kind of electromagnetic effect, but in fact it is simply a case of allowing the sub conscious mind to reach out, so to speak, to the target.

If we take this at face value, and there is no particular reason not to, then we have an example illustrating that we simply do not know the limits of psi, of which dowsing is simply an application.

Here is an intriguing suggestion. That accidents at certain black spots, where there is no obvious attributable cause, may be due to “geopathic stress” or streams flowing  under the road. According to the BSD journals, this idea has been seriously entertained in Germany during the early 1950s.

In BSD journal, no 69, p151, there is the rather alarming article “The death spot at kilometre 7.5” by A. Wrede, which is a translation from the German publication, “Hannoversde Presse”, of October, 1948.

http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No69_1950_p151.pdf

Apparently near the kilometre stone 7.5 on the “national road”, or highway 75 from Hamburg to Bremen, there was a fatal accident involving an “English Captain”, which was followed by hundreds of other accidents near the same spot. However, it was asserted that there was no obvious cause to explain these events. That was not until a dowser named Augustus Wrede proposed that some sort of harmful radiation from an underground stream might be responsible. He claimed by dowsing, that a stream crossed the road north-south and created a “reaction band” 8 metres wide, within which he obtained such a  strong reaction, that he could hardly hold the rod down. His hypothesis was that an unsuspecting driver, holding the steering wheel too tightly, would swerve when entering the zone, when the muscles in their arms experienced contractions.  

As a result of his proposal, some tests were conducted by a few local police and journalists, who drove a car over the supposedly affected are of road. Rather surprisingly, they found that their test car, when moving over the zone, but not driven (ie the car was moving but no one holding the steering wheel), would repeatedly veer across the road in the direction of flow of the supposed underground stream. But it did not exhibit this behaviour anywhere else in the road. A kind of PK effect seemed to be at work here.

However, when the accidents along the road were analysed in totality, it was concluded that there were fairly evenly distributed and could be accounted for except for the case of the English Captain. This story remains intriguing, though probably almost impossible to verify in practice. Still, one wonders whether there was ever more published in the German press about it since then.

There a number of postscripts to add. In BSD journal no71,p310, in a brief review of the journal “Revue Internationale de Radiesthesie” (LRPT) no22.  It is mentioned that a road near Bremen (but it is not clear whether it is highway 75), experienced 100 car crashes in a particular stretch. It is stated that several dowers got reaction to underground stream, by dowsing a photograph of this stretch of road, even though no suggestion was provided to them.

In BSD journal, no86,  p124, 1954, in another review of LRPT, of  October 1954, mention is made of  an article in a French publication named, “Votre Auto” of Herr Wrede’s idea  that holding a steering wheel is likened to a dowser with rod. The article went on to say that the subject of dangerous earth energies has been raised in German courts. But based on an analysis of a large number of accidents, an alternative suggestion was that meteorological conditions might affect physiological reactions. Apparently, an Institute in Munich studied 100,000 accident s down to atmospheric conditions, and Earth rays can exacerbate this effect.  

There are a few UK references to the possibility of accident black spots due to earth energies, but the idea of the these so called energies, originated amongst European dowsers and took quite some time to become established here.

But to finish, while attending a BSD conference some time ago, I remember during his talk, a senior member of the society, with extensive dowsing experience, told the audience that he had (at least once) driven over an “energy line” crossing the road, and I recall that he had either momentarily passed out, (or at least very nearly). The experience had obviously troubled him. So perhaps there is something after all, though maybe it all depends on the sensitivity of the driver.

After reading many accounts of dowsing exploits, the truly remarkable can become perhaps a little pedestrian. This is not true of the following article:

“Dowsing adventures in the land of the Jesuits”, by Sir Christopher Gibson, Baronet

http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_no77_1952_p293.pdf

It recounts the South American adventures of Sir Christopher Gibson. He relates a tale which might have come from the Indiana Jones school of dowsing. Obviously, a man of considerable psi abilities and an enthusiastic dowser.

In 1951, having become rather disillusioned with water dowsing, he turned is hand to dowsing for treasure. The focus of his story being his search for a fabled golden bell, cast from 400 kg of gold, by the Jesuits in Paraguay.  He appears to have had the ability to enter a trance-like state, through which he was able to psychically gain information about the past, through clairvoyance and clairaudience.  He claimed that this information was relayed to him by long deceased people, who had had knowledge of the bell during their lifetimes. In addition to this, he used dowsing. In contrast to his psychical prowess, he seems to have considered dowsing to be purely a response to physical causes, a common conception amongst dowsers at that time. Therefore, he talks of this psychically physical approach throughout.

The article might be a little hard to follow on first reading. The first three pages give an overview, then the story is told chronologically. This follows the author’s attempts to find the bell which has been buried in order to protect it. Later he attempts a similar feat for more Jesuit gold. The story involves precognition, ghosts, intrigue, and curious misleading “images”  of the bell (in dowsing this is referred to as “rémanence”, in which an object which has been buried in the ground for some time before its removal, can leave a psychic impression behind, which to the dowser appears to be the indistinguishable from the real thing.)

The story is a remarkable account of the reach of psychic powers in certain gifted individuals.