What an insight it has been to study the findings of this man. You might think that an archeologist who became Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and Director of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, steeped in the history of primitive mankind, old bones and ancient buildings, as he was, to be a pretty dry as dust and stuffy fellow. Not so!
Tom Lethbridge, who died in 1971, wrote a number of exciting and highly readable books. They form a collection which has been called one of the most fascinating records of paranormal research ever gathered, which are only just beginning to be fully appreciated.
Combining the skills of a scientist with a completely open mind, he conducted a series of experiments which convinced him of a master plan beyond evolution and physical death. Colin Wilson called him a man whose gifts were far ahead of his time and credited him with one of the most remarkable and original minds in parapsychology.
Of all the works of the great writers and philosophers, gurus and sages I have read, Lethbridge emerges as the clearest, brightest and altogether most convincing of them all. This large-size Cambridge don, with his lifelong interest in digging up the past, started excavating in an entirely different manner when he decided to try dowsing when on an archeological expedition to the island of Lundy. He had retired from Cambridge to Devon at the age of 56 and had no interest in the occult. He did know, however, that dowsing - the ability to find things by using a forked twig, rod or similar instrument - is not only possible but has been known and practised for centuries. Science sneers at it, despite the countless books and papers on the subject, and more than a few members of learned societies have learnt to their cost that dabbling in such things can lead to ostracism.
Lethbridge's first attempt came when trying to locate volcanic dikes on Lundy which had been buried since the birth of civilisation. Using a hazel rod he found them all in quick succession and he rejoiced in his new found ability. It started him off on a journey into another world. Hidden objects did not stay hidden for long when Lethbridge was out and about with his rods, twigs or pendulum. There seemed to be nothing he could not detect. But was there? What about thoughts and emotions?
If you think we are now entering the land of fantasy you may be permitted to gulp and turn away. Fortunately, Tom Lethbridge, the respected archaeologist, was made of sterner and much more inquisitive stuff. He had proved to his complete satisfaction not only that dowsing worked but that it was "mind stuff" - the rod or pendulum was connected to the mind of the person holding it.
If you are still with me and are spluttering "why?" "how?" or "nonsense!" then you should start examining the evidence for yourself. I have to repeat that this phenomenon exists. It is clearly and fully documented. It really works, and can only be described as a kind of second sight. And if you ask me why more is not generally known about dowsing and why you were never told about it at school, I have to tell you that there are many other similar subjects regarded by our teachers and mentors as taboo. These things exist but to mention them brands you a weirdo or crank.
My only regret, at the close of my life, is that I have not spent much time actively investigating dowsing and other related wonders. Perhaps I have not been brave enough. I have, however, met some sturdy souls who have defied convention and the wrath of their fellows by daring to cock a snook at dogma and accepted beliefs and have plunged through the curtain into that other world.
Tom Lethbridge's results proved to be not only accurate but repeatable, and he found the responses appeared to be governed by vibrations of various wavelengths. The wavelength of water, for instance, was different to that of metal. His principal instrument became the pendulum, and he found a lot depended on the length of the pendulum's cord. He was able to test not only for minerals but abstract things and qualities like anger, death, deceit. sleep, colours, male and female. How he achieved this you will have to find out for yourself, but he even tested for ghosts and life after death.
Now, you will say, that really is reaching out of this world into the heights of absurdity. Reaching out is right. Absurd it clearly isn't, once you begin to grasp the extent of Lethbridge's findings.
This determined and most literate man was aware that many people would regard his methods and findings with suspicion. Being a born doubter himself he could understand such feelings. He once wrote: "It is impossible for it to be imaginary. If you can use a pendulum to work out within an inch or two exactly where something lies hidden beneath undisturbed turf, and do this in front of witnesses, and then go to the spot which the pendulum has indicated and take off the turf, dig up the soil beneath and find the object. If you can do this same operation again and again and almost always succeed, this cannot be imagination, delusion, or any of those things. It is scientific experiment, however crude it may be."
Perhaps the reason why some still cannot accept dowsing is because it is so incredibly simple. At no cost at all you can produce an instrument no piece of expensive machinery can equal. But everything, of course, depends on the operator
Lethbridge found himself confronted with a very strange world - "far stranger I feel than anything produced by physics, botany or biology", and he wrote of millions of cones of force surrounding each of us in our homes and backyards which can be contacted instantly by rays projected from our own psyche fields. It was much more difficult to comprehend than molecules, atoms and electrons, he said, because we had been brought up to take these for granted. I suppose that a hundred years ago, if you tried to explain to people the theory of radio and television, they might have found it equally difficult to understand.
So where does the power to work a pendulum come from? Lethbridge intervenes with another other question - Where does the power come from to enable a shearwater to find its chick, or a fox to find its mate?
It is all tied up apparently with the life force which makes the universe tick. There is, he thought, something invisible and intangible attached to our body which knows far more than we do. Is it mind or soul? Some sort of electromagnetic or psyche field? Something linked to a higher dimension? He agonised over this and admitted he wasn't wise enough to come to any definite conclusion, apart from the thought that earlier man knew far more about it than we do today
.More about dowsing
Some years ago when returning from a short but eventful holiday in Spain (which itself deserves documenting) I met a former RAF officer named Clive Beaman. We were heading for Southampton on the ferry Princess Patricia and were celebrating our escape from a rather nasty encounter with the Basques. We found we'd both served our time on an island in the Cocos Keeling group during the war but had not met because he was of elevated rank and on another squadron.
I quickly discovered, that we had one interest in common. He was a dowser, a professional dowser, and he made what he admitted to be a very profitable living by divining for oil and minerals with the aid of a pendulum. I should have contacted him later, because I was then working for the BBC and he would have made an excellent interview for a news programme. That was in 1987. I did not see him again until early in 1996, and it was on the TV screen. He appeared with Uri Geller and Matthew Manning in an investigation into the paranormal presented by Sir David Frost. It was a pathetic show in which everything seemed to go wrong, and Wing Commander Beaman did not appear until almost the end. He demonstrated how he dowsed from maps and even located the source of a huge oil deposit in Windsor Great Park. He had aged a bit, but had more get up and go than the other participants, including Geller. Alas, he died late in 1996.
Professor Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, recently published the results of a German government sponsored ten year dowsing The aim was. to test divining methods to locate water sources in such dry parts of Sri Lanka, Zaire, Kenya, Namibia, Yemen and other countries . It was the most ambitious experiment with water dowsing ever carried out, and the project involved more than 2,000 drillings.
When you consider that lack of good drinking water affects about two billion people and it's a problem that's growing, even the scientific skeptics are forced to look around for any means of solving it. It was the enormity of the problem that led the German government to form a team of geological experts, experienced dowsers and scientists led by Professor Betz.
The outcome was described as striking., with an overall success rate of 96% by the dowsers. A success rate of 30-50% is normal when using conventional techniques ..
What is enormously important, according to Betz, is that in hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well. and nearly all of the drill sites were in regions where the odds of finding water by random drilling were extremely low.
I am reminded of a chat with a chicken farmer when visiting friends in Shropshire in 1995. The number of chickens he was rearing in a building the size of an aircraft hanger amounted to thousands, and they consumed many gallons of water a day. When the source of supply, a well, suddenly dried up and immediate action was required, the farmer sent for the local dowser, who very quickly paced the field in which the chickens were housed. With rods reacting positively over one spot in the field, the dowser stopped, drew a coin from his pocket, spat on it, hurled it to the ground and said "dig down there 30 feet and you'll find water". The farmer did and discovered an abundant supply.
In the country dowsing is accepted as a fact.