Nexus - 0303 - New Times Magazine-pages

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fully had dowsed water for their company's proposed factory sites. gists and physicists and stated in his book, The Problem of Geo- It took place in the corridors of a long multi-storeyed building pathic Phenomena from the Viewpoint of Geophysics: We must where a typical dowsing reaction zone had been correlated with a _ not forget that what has been called the problem of the divining water vein tapped by a successful well that produced large quanti- _rod is but one of a number of allied problems and that the question ties of water. of geophysical influences on living beings is one of the greatest On five floors about three-and-a-half metres, one above the importance for biology and, even more significantly, for medi- other, two reaction zones each aboul two metres wide were cine." recorded. In spite of three layers of heavy reinforced concrete that In September of the same year, Dr Joseph Wiist and others for separated the top floor from the bottom, the zones of an unidenti- the first time worked with Geiger counters to prove the emission fied radiation, called the D-agent (D for "dowsing") by Comunetti, of gamma radiation—one of the chief results of radioactivity— were found to lie on a straight line that, in this case, deviated fif- directly under ‘cancer beds' in the town of Pleutersbach. teen degrees eastward from the vertical. The rod reaction was As successive studics of this type were taken up, an engineer, equally strong for all five floors, indicating no attenuation of the Jacob Stangle, living near the Wiirttemberg metropolis of Ulm, D-agent radiation by the concrete. was beginning to design a new instrument that, by the early 1970s, His experimentation, said Comunetti, should be repeated in tall seemed not only to settle the gamma ray ‘connection’ once and for buildings and in underground mines as well because it might be of _all but bid fair to fulfill a longstanding dream of dowsers: the cre- great practical importance for all kinds of geological prospecting. ation of a dowsing machine that could prove beyond the shadow It occurred to Cody that the telluric emission might be due to —_ of a doubt their assertions that water flowed in veins. radioactivity of some kind. Accordingly, he placed sheets of lead When gamma rays penetrate a crystalline sensor in Stangle's under an electrometer positioned over radiation zones and noted _ device, they cause it to scintillate, or throw off extremely weak that the time needed for its discharge rose from seven seconds to _ flashes of light emitted by atoms in the sensor-material, as they forty-nine minutes. The normally grey sheets, when left in place _ return to a normal energy state after having been ionised or excit- for more than a month, became discoloured by peacock-blue or ed by gamma rays or charged particles passing through the materi- canary-yellow patches, the exact al. These are converted, in turn, to shape and size of the radiation zones electrical pulses and amplified mil- presumably causing the discoloration. | lions of times by a photomultiplier Both observations indicated the lead |. tube. Since the magnitude of the was, in fact, blocking a radioactive | "| the question of geophysical pulses of light are proportional to the radiation. Be fl li « b . » energy lost by particles traversing Cody stated in emphatic terms that | INIUENCeS ON LIVIN DEINYS IS ONC FH the scintillator, they can thus provide many cases of physical ailments pro- | of the greatest importance for information about the energy of par- duced by telluric radiation were ame- | ticles that can be translated and read liorated by moving subjects’ beds | biology and, even more out on strip chart recorders or electri- away from the radiation zone or by ionifi ; icine." cal meters. screening the zone with lead sheets. significantly, for medicine. When ‘soft’, or lower frequency, In his book, Experimental Study of Air gamma radiation from great depth Ionization by a Certain Radioactivity becomes attenuated by the strata in the Soil and Its Influence on Human through which it passes, the scintilla- Health, he wrote that in 491 cases of ill- tion counter relies on ‘hard’, or higher ness the afflicted persons would experience an increase of pain frequency, gamma radiation with more penetrating power and during the first several weeks following the installation of a lead _ especially on neutrons, atomic particles of neutral charge that sheet, after which a marked improvement was to be noticed in move at such high speeds they must be slowed down by a special their condition. If the lead sheets were renewed often enough, a crystal filter before being detected by the phosphor-sensor in great many cases were healed and, for the rest, progress of the dis- | which they produce flashes through nuclear collision. ease was retarded. If the sheet was not renewed, after several Over any spot on Earth there is a weak normal ‘background’ of months maladies took a sudden turn for the worse. gamma radiation that is constantly emitted from underground stra Though Cody's work was supported by the eminent physicist ta. When first switched on, Stingle's machine picks up this back and director of Duke Louis de Broglie’s laboratory, Louis le ground and, as it is wheeled along, registers any variation in th Prince-Ringuet, the engineer's startling conclusions were given no —_ quantity of radiation. more attention by the medical world than had been paid to the After fifteen years of tinkering with his invention, Stangle, wh: findings of von Pohl and other German researchers more than ten _ had no support from private industry or government, was able 1 years before. report in 1973 that it characteristically revealed a sharp increase in After World War II, dowsing scientists in Germany gathered radiation over underground water veins such that reliable conclu- more evidence that biological effects in humans were being sions could be made about the depth and even the flow-intensity caused by exposure to telluric radiation. of any given vein. “Its trustworthiness," wrote the cngineer, "has Johann Walther, who later received an honorary medical degree, been confirmed by drilling hundreds of wells with such accuracy was the first to coin the term "geopathy" for the study of harmful that one can predict the future possibility of detecting underground or "geopathic” telluric zones. In his booklet, "The Mystery of the _ water veins precisely.” Divining Rod", Walther urged physicians with patients suffering When medical rescarchers learned of his new ‘dowser on from degenerative disease to have their homes dowsed. Forcing wheels’, Sttingle was asked to check the old von Pohl findings at patients back into bed where they could be exposed to noxious Vilsbiburg. Provided with some of von Pohl's originally traced radiation he said was like driving horses back into a burning barn. _ results by Dr Werner Kaufmann of Giessen, he trundled his new In 1955, Dr V. Fritsch, a German geophysicist, underscored the Continued 7e 84 need for combined research by dowsers, medical doctors, geolo- APRIL-MAY 1996 40 * NEXUS Continued on page 84