Skeptilab - The Pseudoscience of Dowsing with Andy Richter

Jim Underdown is joined by actor and comedian Andy Richter (Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Three Questions with Andy Richter) for a “deep dive” into the pseudoscience of dowsing.

Supposedly dowsing can find anything and everything, including missing persons, buried pipes, oil deposits, and even archaeological ruins. The most popular form of dowsing is water dowsing (also known as water witching or rhabdomancy), in which a person holds a Y-shaped branch or two L-shaped wire rods and walks around until being pulled or the wire rods cross, which allegedly indicates that there is water below.

Read More from Skeptical Inquirer and the CFIIG Case Files

[velosucker]

I’m a plumber, currently running a water main and sewer main for a client. Had a gentleman from the water company use dowsing rods to locate existing pipes for us to connect to. He located 5 pipes, we dug the whole area up and found 0 pipes, the services were on a completely other side of the property. 😅

[nisyturtle]

I saw the thumbnail and was like "That guy looks exactly like Andy Richter"
and it was!

[puckhockey]

It's difficult for me to argue this, but I've "dowsed" for water lines before, and it worked well. I used the two parallel metal rods (welding rods) and helped my neighbor map out the pipes in his front yard. FYI when the rods crossed, if I *backed up* they would begin to uncross. They also would cross under power lines, and over underground pipes that *don't* have water in them. Obviously when you want to find a specific pipeline in a whole yard you will want to do it in a grid fashion to get a complete "map" so you can tell where the pipe you're looking for leads to, and not confuse it with other things. I'm a pretty big skeptic generally speaking, and I consider myself a realist, but after doing it myself, I have to sit on the side of the dowsers at least to some extent. I wish more serious inquiries and controlled experiments were done, rather than these "Amazing Randini" style refutations.

[evilmeerkat]

Thames water until very recently supplied their workmen with dowsing rods to find water pipes. I saw them in the street myself. There are also newspaper articles from 10 years ago when people complained about the "psudoscience" and to my knowledge forced them to stop using them.

[jdoodle]

When smart arses don't understand something, they dismiss it. Typical.

[StephenMelody]

Jim, I am a professional dowser (called a diviner in Australia). Over my 40 years of seeking water for land holders in a very dry continent, I have only ever got one call wrong where the hole produced mud and no liquid water ( I did warn the landholder that this was a very high risk drill.) I would be very happy to take you up on your half a million dollar challenge but in very different circumstances from the test you set up in this video. A water diviner mostly finds underground water in cracks in rocks that form a continuous underground stream rarely more than 2 feet wide. The water in these steams originally comes from surface water deposits like lakes, rivers, creeks and dams, or from aquifers where surface water have seeped down through porous layers, but is finally trapped by an impervious layer, thus forming an underground lake. Sometimes, the diviner simply gets the driller to drill directly into the aquifer. The key thing here is that diviners find underground water in its natural state. This is what they are used to doing. Therefore, any skeptic who wants to debunk dowsing needs to design an experiment that involves the dowser finding underground water in its natural state. Your experiment did not do this, and furthermore, your subject was not really a dowser. So you cannot extrapolate the results of your experiment to the real world situation. The geologist's explanation of why dowsers do find water is completely unproven. Yes, there are places where you can find water no matter where you put down the hole because you have landed on an aquifer. However, aquifers are few and far between and they only make up a tiny fraction of the land surface. For your geologists claim to be supported by facts, the whole surface of a country would have to be drilled on a 1 yard grid. As I am sure this has not happened, your geologists claim is purely speculation.
Over the years, I have honed my divining skills to be able to predict the location of an underground stream or aquifer, the width of the structure involved, if the stream contains any water, where the water stops in the stream, the height of the fracture in the rock carrying water, the depth to the bottom of the stream, the salinity of the water in ppm, and the total dissolved solids(TDS) content in ppm. I am rarely wrong on any of these measures by more than 10%. If you were to multiply the probably of me getting all those features correct to within 10%, the probably would be 1: an extremely large number. Yet, I get these same results week after week. There would not be a mathematician on earth who would be game to say that I find underground water by chance.
Jim, I am very disappointed that you have presented this video to the public as fact when it is far from fact. Maybe if you followed me around in the field for a few days, you might take a fairer view of the important work a dowser does to help provide water security for a landholder.

[robpalmer]

Hmmmm. I am confused. This test clearly makes sense with people claiming the ability. Has Andy claimed to be able to do this? Also, the test subject should first show it “working” for them with uncovered test items.

[marcusst]

I've dowsed for water and it worked every time so far.

[RealStuntPanda]

I can find water 100% of the time using just a cup and a faucet. I want my $500, 000 damn it!

[Subfightr]

Whaaaat?! Andy is with CFI?! This is awesome!

[rainbowboa]

i been diong this since i was about 10, it's never failed me yet! i even located a pipe that had already been located by the city. they were only about 10 ft off! i even got the lady who owned it, to do it! (kinda freaked her out when the rods moved!)

[noahunderwood]

we use it a work all the time looking for water and sewer lines and it works

[kraknjaws]

So cool that the great andy richter could be pulled away from harassing school girls to tell us about this

[CRWenger]

I have seen for myself the Water Department of the City of Sandusky, Ohio use dowsing rods to locate city water lines. I'm not saying it works, they're saying it works?🤷‍♂️

[da]

So technically, there was water under wherever Andy Richter's dowsers crossed. They just needed to drill down deeper. Andy was robbed.

[logan]

This is awesome! We need more no-nonsense explanations of things like dowsing rods for the general public.

[BNK]

The coolest thing Richter did was shuting up goldblum when the latter tried to defend circumcision.

[avery_atleast]

I always liked Andy. I’m glad he does this work with CFI.

[christianvandermaas]

😂 Lol .. I’m a +30 year Neuroscientist… hope you got your cheque book. I get it with your idiomotor effect, but do you understand what it really is 😂😂

[centaur]

Another great video! Loved to see Andy Richter working with CFI!