What is dowsing?

What is dowsing?

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Dowsing is the alleged ability to be able to locate particular substances, typically water, and a variety of different instruments are used in dowsing. Most typically, people will use fork-shaped twigs trees - it's claimed that if you hold the tree branch at both forks, the end will dip down when you're over water. Some people use pendulums for dowsing as well, and there are a variety of other techniques that are used. It's not only the claim that you can locate water using dowsing but also that you could locate minerals, that you could locate lost objects and so on and so forth. Some people even go further and claim that they can dowse over a map, and these dowsers will claim that they can locate missing persons or dead bodies that people have been unable to find, and they basically just get out the map, they'll take out their pendulum, they'll hold the pendulum over the map, move the pendulum. At a certain point it will start to move. Another very common belief is that you can use a dowsing pendulum to determine the sex of an unborn child, unborn baby. Again, there's no convincing evidence that these things really work when you test them under properly controlled conditions.