And among the various solutions being considered to find water, the use of dowsers is gaining ground.

A dowser is a person who claims to be able to detect underground water using rods or a pendulum. With these tools, dowsers ‘feel’ the energy circulating through nature.

“There are energies involved with the flow of water underground, and that creates an electromagnetic field,” Sharry Hope told The Los Angeles Times.

This resident of Oroville, California has been practicing dowsing, a divination process to detect waves, for decades. “She said she feels that energy when she uses her rods,” writes the LA Times journalist, who goes on to cite the rates charged by one of the dowsers interviewed: US$1,500 for the first two hours, $650 for the following hours. In France, TF1 reports that prices start at around €150.

No more accurate than chance?

Faced with a technique that is supposedly a gift, how can we be sure of the authenticity of this practice?

Indeed, the art of dowsing raises questions. The largest study conducted on the phenomenon was carried out in Munich, Germany between 1986 and 1988.

In it, 500 dowsers were pre-selected to perform the experiment and only 43 of them were selected to take the final tests.

These candidates had to detect a quantity of water circulating in a pipe placed under a false floor randomly positioned by a robot.

Each dowser performed a series of five to 15 tests over a period of two years (a total of 843 tests) by traversing the surface and indicating the position of the water mass.

According to the statistical results, “there was no difference between the dowsers’ performance and a random detection,” reports L’Observatoire zététique, based on an article in the American scientific magazine Skeptical Inquirer published in 1999.

In the meantime, if people are effectively leaving the search for new sources of water to chance, that may not bode well for the future of humanity…