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.