ST. HELENA, Calif. – With California in the grips of drought, farmers throughout the state are using a mysterious and some say foolhardy tool for locating underground water: dowsers, or water witches.

Locating underground water by use of a forked stick is a practice that has been known and used for centuries. Indeed, a European scholar named Georgius Agrocola published a treatise on the subject as ...

There are numerous studies that show dowsing is no more effective at discovering water or whatever than pure chance or a guess. Sometimes dowsing is referred to as divining. In the US and elsewhere ...

ST. HELENA, Calif. (AP) — With California in the grips of drought, farmers throughout the state are using a mysterious and some say foolhardy tool for locating underground water: dowsers, or water ...

“I’m going to get comfortable here and hold this button above the water,” says Mike Gerhard as he sits on his lawn. “If there’s water underneath the ground here, the button will start moving. And ...

Updated 7 a.m. Wednesday Most of the major water companies in the United Kingdom use dowsing rods — a folk magic practice discredited by science — to find underwater pipes, according to an Oxford Ph.D ...

George Dellaganna watches his two metal wands crisscross as he locates an underground stream on a North County Ranch. David Middlecamp [email protected] Science can’t explain everything, ...

Dowsers do more than find water. Dowsing, also called water witching or divining, is an ancient art used to find the unknown, including the location of water or minerals, or unresolved health ...

In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 13, 2014, proprietor Marc Mondavi demonstrates dowsing with "diving rods" to locate water at the Charles Krug winery in St. Helena, Calif. As water supplies shrink ...

ST. HELENA, Calif. — With California in the grips of drought, farmers throughout the state are using a mysterious and some say foolhardy tool for locating underground water: dowsers, or water witches.