Ray Cook:

                       Ray Cook has been dowsing since 1975 when he was 26 years old!

Ray's Stories:

         Ray has a lot of stories to tell from his experience of dowsing. There was this one man that Ray was dowsing for, the man wanted a well and had Ray come out to see if there was water anywhere on his land. Ray searched his land for some water but didn't find any, the man then asked Ray to check by the shed. Now Ray thought that was a peculiar question, but he did anyway. As he was walking around the shed, the rods crossed at one point. They weren't crossed for any longer that two feet and one foot wide. Ray suggested that it could be an infant or an animal. The man was acting nervous now and told Ray that he had hit his neighbors cat around two months ago and never told him. Ray has also come across dead bodies along  a highway. He had heard rumors about two people that had been killed and buried off the highway. When he found the dead bodies, he found that they were both males. If there is a dead person buried underground Ray can tell the sex of the person by using one rod instead of both. With the one rod, he holds it over the site of the body and if the rod sways right then it is a male and if the rod sways left then it is a female. Ray says that whenever he is over his sons grave, the rods smack against him violently; however when he is over his sons mother's grave, the rods don't smack against him very hard.

          One of Ray's friends asked him if he could look for some water on his property. So Ray went over to his property to look for water. As ray was looking he found this one area that he felt was a lot of water. Ray said that it was the strongest that he ever felt. So Ray's friend had a guy come out with a drill to dig a hole for a well. Around 200 feet down Ray's friend asked him if he was sure that there was water there, Ray replied "I'm sure of it". Sure enough 300 feet down they found water and the well pumped 50 Gallons Per Minute!

          Ray says that in all the years of him dowsing, he has never been wrong about something, like water, being underground! He also hasn't ever been able to dowse with the stick or the pendulum.

In Depth:

      Dowsing rods, aka. vining rods, have been used since the Renaissance era during the 18th Century, in France. When Dowsing first came over to the United States it was called Doodle Bucking. People started to use them to try and find water for wells, later on people began to try and use them for find precious metals such as gold. Dowsing rods have also been used in the past to find petroleum and oils, however no one has been able to find any using dowsing rods.

      The American Society of Dowsers (ASD) was established in 1961. Some of the people who can dowse charge money to have them look for water on a property, however some do not charge anything. If you dowse with a twig/branch, then it has to be a certain type of wood such as: Willow, Peach Tree, or Hazel wood. Some dowsers prefer a specific branch or wood to dowse with. Dowsing can be traced back to Northern African cave paintings. The first documented people to actually dowse were a German man and a French man. During the Vietnam War the soldiers used dowsing to find locations.

What is Dowsing?

            Dowsing is a profession/hobby that people do to find water or dead bodies underground without modern technologies. What a dowser would do is take two brass rods, a stick with a fork in it, or a pendulum and walk around until one of those object indicates something underground. When dowsers use the two brass rods, that are bent at 1/3 of the rod to make a 90 degree angle, and they hold the rods one foot apart and one foot from their chest they wait for the rods to cross. This indicates water or a body, depending on how large the area they are crossing. People have been dowsing for over 8,000 years. Ray Cook is the dowser that has taught us some great information. Albert Einstein,General Patton, Leonardo da Vinci, Otto Elder von Graeve, Uri Geller, A. Frank Glahn, Thomas Charles Lethbridge, Ludwig Straniak, Emmy Kitterman, and Jacques Aymar Vernay were dowsers, as Ray has informed us.

What do Dowsers find?

        Dowsers have been know to try and find minerals under the ground such as gold. People have also been notorious to try and find oil through dowsing; however there has been no evidence of anyone ever being able to find oil through dowsing. A long time ago dowsing used to be considered witchcraft. Water dowsing is the most common form that people do, however there are other forms of dowsing such as finding dead bodies. In a 1948 study, tests were done on 58 dowsers and none were any more reliable than chance. The rod used to dowse used to be called a vining rod because people would use the rod to find veins of water for digging wells. More recently people have used the term "witching" in place of dowsing.

           If you were dowsing with a pendulum to would walk around until the pendulum begins to swing around in a circular motion. If the pendulum swings around clockwise, then there is water. With a stick, you hold the two ends of the stick that go into one and walk around until the stick bows down toward the ground.