Nexus - 0303 - New Times Magazine-pages

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correlated with the overall stratigraphy or underground rock for- mations as they had hoped. When dowsers told them to check the five major geological faults that all of them agreed ran under the city, the researchers were astonished to see that the faults tra- versed those districts with the highest rates of cancer mortality. They promulgated the theory that some kind of radiation emanat- ing from the faults might be an important cause of cancer that had been completely overlooked. The Winzer-Melzer survey stimulated the German aristocrat Gustav Freiherr von Pohl who, in 1929, began the first systematic study of human cancer and its possible link to zones of noxious telluric radiation. Selecting the Bavarian community of Vils- biburg with 8,500 inhabitants, he dowsed its entire confines under the watchful eyes of the mayor and local gendarmes who signed a protocol describing the survey. On a 1:1,000 map of the town, von Pohl traced those veins of water which he considered impor- tant cnough to play a role in cancer etiology, after which they were compared to the plottings of cancer deaths in houses by one Bernhumber, Vilsbiburg's medical adviser. Precise examinations were next made of those houses only partially affected by the water veins, and the beds of cancer patients were confirmed to have actually stood directly above them. Cancer specialists openly scoffed at the new report which they considered worthless because, as they claimed, the incidence of cancer was so high and Vilsbiburg so small that von Pohl's conclu- sions about radiation-produced cancer meant nothing. Not at all dismayed, von Pohl asked the Bavarian Office of Sta- tistics for the name of the community with the lowest incidence of cancer in the whole province. This tumed out to be Grafenau, a settlement of 2,000 souls in the Bavarian Forest, where von Pohl made a dowsing survey on 4th and Sth May 1930 to find that each of the persons who had died of cancer during the previous seven- teen years had been sleeping over the noxious zones that he had delineated. One-and-a-half years later, a second check determined that ten more cancer victims had succumbed in the interim. It was the work of French dowsing researchers in the early 1930s that first pointed to a possible physical cause behind harm- ful radiations. Articles by two authors in the Céte d'Azur Médicale detailed how electroscopes—instruments that record the electrical conductivity of the air through the detection of the rela- tive presence of ions (atoms which, by gain or loss of an electron, acquire an electric charge)—revealed a higher degree of conduc- tivity over underground veins than over the area adjacent to them. The tie between ionising radiation and the incidence of cancer was made during a seven-year-long study by a French engineer, Pierre Cody, just before the outbreak of World War II. Inspired by dowsers who told him that the inhabitants of many houses in the French port city of Le Havre had died of cancer over several generations, Cody used an Elster and Geitel electrometer to check the concentration of air ions at points in the cellars of houses lying directly under more than 7,000 ‘cancer beds’. His procedure in the house of a Monsieur Truffier, whose wife had succumbed to can- cer, was typical. He placed an electrometer in its cellar directly below the exact location of her cancerous growth when she was lying in bed, and an identical instrument a little more than two metres distant. Ten readings taken during a fourteen-hour period revealed that the first device picked up an ion concentration ten times larger than the second. It was further determined that the band of radiation was no wider than a metre and a half. The second instrument was then moved to within fifty centime- tres of the first. Readings taken over a full year at eight, ten, twelve, fourteen and eighteen hours each day showed exactly the same difference in intensity as when they had been more widely separated—a fact that Jed to the suspicion that the radiation, what- ever it was, rose vertically as it came out of the ground and did not diffuse laterally. This crucially important conclusion has recently been corrobo- rated by the Swiss nuclear physicist, Angelo Comunetti, of Basel. His experiment, specifically designed to check the claim that the reaction field over water veins or geological discontinuities (or both) is perpendicular, was performed with the help of Treadwell and Rupp, the two Hoffman-La Roche executives who so success- a me } lghtning area fon zone crossing f accident area hedge damage to growth Various effects of underground water veins as illustrated by Dr Joseph Kopp. In addition to disease in humans, animals and plants, it has been observed that auto accidents repeatedly occur at points where veins run under roads and highways. {Redrawn from Effects of Harmful Radiations and Noxious Rays, American Society of Dowsers, Danville, Vermont, USA, 1974. Reprinted from The Divining Hand, by Christopher Bird.) APRIL-MAY 1996 NEXUS ¢ 39