Richard Warburton takes a wire coat hanger, cuts the hook off, cuts and straightens the wires and bends the metal into two “L” shaped rods, also known as dowsing rods.
He walks with one rod in each hand in search of finding hidden things underground and the rods crossing indicate that “something” is below.
Most people can dows with minimal training, Warburton said.
“However, for as long as people have been dowsing — at least 500 years — people have been unable to explain how it works or doubted whether it is real,” said Warburton, who was born in the United Kingdom and now lives in Leet. “Even today, the main scientific consensus is that dowsing is not real but merely a manifestation of the ideomotor effect, where expectations cause small unconscious movements of the arms, causing the rods to cross.”
He said the lack of a viable theory, inconsistent practices in dowsing and the label of pseudoscience have prevented any serious scientific study. Warburton decided to study it and record his findings in “The Science of Basic L-Rod Dowsing: An Investigation.”
It was published by McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers, in North Carolina early in 2025.
Karl-Heinz Roseman, vice-president sales and marketing for McFarland, said via email that its mission “largely involves bridging gaps between the academic and the popular.”
“For example, we’re known for scholarly books about film, television, pop culture, folklore, sports and a mind-boggling array of other topics,” Roseman said. “So, when Richard Warburton proposed his serious treatment of dowsing to us, it struck our editorial team as a potential fit for our publishing list. Although dowsing makes an esoteric topic for a book, it also felt simultaneously familiar. Many of us have seen how this folk practice is held as valuable in our communities.”
He said Warburton took an apparently ridiculous idea — determining what’s beneath the ground by basically holding a stick — and focused on what is observable.
There are many types of dowsing, but what Warburton did was basic L-rod dowsing. He believes that L-rod dowsing for underground objects is real because it provides information that is not otherwise known and which can often be subsequently verified.
He began using underground pipes as a known target. He said he found that the “dowsing signal” was blocked by aluminum foil and metal grids with a hole opening less than an inch, but passed through cardboard and metal grids with holes sizes greater than four inches.
“The results of these tests indicate that the dowsing signal is in the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet and x-rays/gamma rays, and has a wavelength between two and 10 centimeters, which corresponds to the microwave region,” Warburton said.
In his research, he eventually came up with explanations for where the microwaves come from. He found out how they are affected by objects such as pipes and water in the ground where the microwaves are detected in the body, somewhere near the base of the brain, and with the rods in his hands, they cross because of small movements of the shoulder muscles.
Warburton, 61, was introduced to dowsing when he was 11 when someone — he can’t remember who — gave him rods as a Christmas present. He ran around finding graves under the floor of an old church.
There are times when utility workers used dowsing rods to find pipes if their maps weren’t good, he said. Today, ground-penetrating radar and other modern methods are used.
“Now they can use more scientific equipment,” he said.
Dowsing has nothing to do with Warburton’s everyday job. He is the chief of technology for a small manufacturing company in Robinson.
Some of his research took place in the Sewickley Valley, which has lot of great places to try dowsing, he said.
As with any research topic, there are many more questions to be asked and answered, Warburton said.
“There are many things that we only partly understood,” he said. “It was only in the last year or so that researchers found how acetaminophen – Tylenol – worked and work is ongoing to understand how our sense of smell works.”
Basic L-rod dowsing and similar dowsing with Y-shaped sticks are a very small part of dowsing and the only types that he is aware of that have a physical basis.
“One of the remarkable things about dowsing is if we think about a pipe six feet down, then there is not much difference in distance from the pipe to the dowser’s head, comparing if the dowser is standing directly over the pipe or two feet either side of the pipe,” Warburton said. “Yet a dowser can identify the position of the pipe to within a couple of inches. Somehow, the dowsing signal is collimated to a very small angle. Imagine looking at an image down a long, thin tube. You would only see a very small part of the image, rather than the whole image.”
He began the research for the book nearly four years ago.
“My long-term goal is that somebody else says, ‘Yes, this is really interesting,’ ” Warburton said. “Someone else who will go and see if they get the same results. If they get something different, then that’s good, too. I’d rather they get the same results I did. I think this is a subject that’s worthy of science or at least scientists taking a look at it.”
“The Science of Basic L-Rod Dowsing: An Investigation” is $49.95 on Amazon and can be ordered through local bookstores.