Pete, if it worked, then any of the claimants would /should submit themselves to a double blind scientific test of the ability.
Yet they don't and won't. And the rare times you can get any of them to submit to testing, they fail. Yes for both water & precious metals.
They're full of claims, and anecdotal casual observers. But never submit their supposed skill to double blind test scrutiny. Ask yourself : Why not ?
Durned them sunspots, lunar flairs, ions-in-the-air, etc.... anyhow !
I'm a natural skeptic. One piece of property I own, we had the water dept come out and turn the water on. The Cover was buried under thick grass, I knew where it was, but I could not even see it, or find it. The guy from the water dept came out, and his stick went right down over top where it was. Proof? no, but.. it was interesting.
We had a 93 year old guy get lost in my area with Alzheimer's. We searched for him for a week or two, multiple planes, etc. Whole community was involved. Through my business I meet a lot of famous people. One was a well known psychic from the 70's. He's been on the Donahue show.
I called him up, and I said, I hate to bother you, but could you help me locate this missing man. The "psychic" lived about 300 miles away from my area. He goes in his English accent "Let me get my Pendulum out'... The he said 'he's 17 mines n nE from where I am now", "He's in water '
I sent a text to a police chief friend of mine, who I was letting use my airplane to look for him. Still have this text on my phone today. about a week later they found him, they gave me the location. I plugged it into my Google, it was 17 miles from my house. Got into my car, drove it... 16.9 miles, last 1/10 was gated off. He was N NE from me. His car was stuck in a big mud puddle up to the doors with mud on each side.
N NE, ok.. you can say thats vague
Water,,,, you can say thats vague
17 miles, right on the button..... run the probability on that.
I've done some research into the paranormal. My guess would be, some of the top people in the metal detecting hobby are using their psychic abilities, for lack of a better word, and don't even know it, supplementing that with the metal detector, to find the better finds.
its my opinion, that possibly some of peoples beliefs in religion, come from these psychic abilities, things occur, they can't explain it, so they automatically give credit to whatever they were near, or were reading,etc at the time of the event.