V
Radiesthesia and Dowsing
Some sources claim that the term radionics is more directly related to its Latin root word radi, which means “circle” and describes the motion made by a pendulum. Radiesthesia is the art of divining using a pendulum. Radiesthesia has been used as a simple form of medical diagnosis for centuries. Many practitioners of radiesthesia refer to radionics as a form of “electronic radiesthesia.” The fact that radionics rarely, if ever, uses a pendulum is of little concern to these people. since they believe that the same principle makes both work.
Dowsing is perhaps the most widely researched form of divination. For three centuries the Jesuit fathers in Europe experimented with and defended dowsing as an art and science. They employed an educated and rational view from which many techniques and theories of dowsing were derived. The theories closely resemble those applied in radionics.
It is believed that a dowser. like someone using the rubbing plate, is allowing his body to become sensitive to the frequencies emanated by certain physical phenomena, such as mineral deposits, underground springs, pipes and tunnels. Each of these creates a vibratory change in the environment.
Dowsing rods or pendulums only seem to serve, as the needles on meters, to amplify minute movements of the body that would otherwise go unnoticed. The successful dowser has to be objective enough to divorce his conscious expectations from his body movements and let his body do the metering.
Dowsing gained a considerable amount of validity when the US Army used the technique to locate Viet Cong tunnels.
The army had been employing sensitive seismic devices to locate the enemy tunnels, but the instruments were really too delicate to be of much use in an active war zone. Someone at an army research lab, who grew up in the hills of Tennessee, suggested the dowsing techniques he had seen as a boy. They worked, and a fair number of “average” Gls could be trained to use an L-shaped rod which swiveled in the hand to find tunnels. The program was so successful that the VC found it profitless to dig tunnels any more.
The Soviets also experimented with this phenomenon and found that it was valid.
The most plausible theory for dowsing is one that maintains that the body’s neural network acts as a large antenna. In order to hold one’s arm out, there must be counterbalancing neural impulses, pulsating thousands of times a minute, in the muscles, in order to keep the limb in position. However, when a sufficient electromagnetic field hits one side of the arm, the impulses fire at a different rate. The result is a slight pulling of the arm to one side; the movement is thus shown by the swiveling rod.
The US. Army experiments had a man with a nonmagnetic L-rod walk between two coils that would emit electromagnetic fields when turned on. Either coil would be turned on randomly and it was found that the body was sensitive enough to detect the field in nearly all trials.
VI
Radionic Dowsing
T. Galen Hieronymus developed a detection device in the 1940’s that used radionics to assay minerals. The machine used a bizarre variation on previous techniques. Instead of placing the specimen in contact with the plate or machine, Hieronymus placed it on a platform in front of a prism or lens which focused the energy from the material to a metal plate, which went through a simple variable resistor into a three-tube amplifier and then to a detector plate made of plastic with a fine wire coil under it (see Figs. 1 and 2).
Fig. 1 — The design of the Hieronymus machine, U.S. patent number 2,482,773. Radiation from ore sample is picked up by coil L1 and tuned by condenser C1. A fixed electrode, E1, radiates “eloptic” waves through a slit which is cut in a material, B, that provides “opaque insulation” (i.e., light cannot pass through it and it is non-metallic). Prism differentially refracts the energy to a moveable electrode, E2, which explores the output. This is fed into a three-stage broad-band amplifier. (There is no specified frequency range to tune the condenser to.) This is finally directed to the detector, which is made of about 40 turns of No. 22 enameled copper wire in a flat spiral and sandwiched between two 4″ x 5″ plates of 1/4-inch polystyrene plastic.
With this machine, it is possible to amuse party guests for hours, telling the difference between lead and gold or other minerals, for that is about all it is good for at this stage of development. But the Hieronymus machine differed from all its predecessors in that it used what he called “eloptic” energy — energy that has the characterics of both light and electricity. John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950’s, became intrigued with this device. He spoke to Hieronymus about this new concept in energy:
The “eloptic radiation” is neither electrical nor optical radiation, of course; Hieronymus reports that not only would metallic conductors carry it, but light can also act as a conductor. Consequence: if wires transmitting eloptic energy are strongly illuminated, they act as though immersed in conducting liquid. [Mystics keep saying they can’t operate in the presence of light. Maybe there’s a connection?]
Fig. 2 — Three-tube amplifier for Hieronymus machine. It is important that the tubes and circuit be insulated from light.
Tubes — 6AU6
R1, R4, R7 — 15,000-ohm,1/4-watt
R2, R5, R8 — 1000-ohm, 1/2-watt
R3, H6, R9 — 40,000-ohm, 1/2-watt
R10, R11 — 1,000-ohm, 1/2-watt
L2, L3, L4 — 2.5-millihenry RF choke (Millen subminiature type)
C2, C3, C4 — .001-uF miniature ceramic
C5, C6, C7, C8 — 10-uF, four-section 300-volt electrolytic
C9, C10, C11 — .01-uF ceramic
Campbell obtained the patent diagrams and did some of his own experiments with the Hieronymus analyzer. His initial reactions follow:
A piece of pig lead was put in front of the pickup coil, and the plastic plate of the detector was stroked with the fingers, as Hieronymus instructed. According to his patent, when the exploring electrode was properly aligned, the detector plate would feel “tacky” to the fingers.
I didn’t like what I got. So I called in my ten-year-old daughter. She was aware that Daddy had been, as usual, building something at the electronics bench. This meant nothing to her; radio and electronics being my hobby, there’s usually some sort of electronics project underway; hi-fi amplifiers, oscilloscopes, photomultiplier light meters — something. My daughters are not unaccustomed to being asked to wiggle dials, push buttons or watch meters at one end of the shop while I adjust something at the other end.
This, then, was for her simply another one of my somewhat boring gadgets, which she was being asked to help adjust. Stroking a plastic plate is no more outre than watching the dancing patterns of an oscilloscope. So . . .
“You tune it like a radio, by turning this knob, and you stroke this plastic gimmick here. Tune it until the plastic feels different.”
“Feels different? What do you mean? Different how?”
“Hmmm . . . well, that’s for you to tell me. Maybe it‘ll feel furry like a kitten, all of a sudden; or maybe it will feel as though it turned into a bowl, instead of being flat. But you tune it and tell me.“
Presently she stopped, turned back and said. “It feels like . . . sort of like tar. If I push on it, my fingers get stuck.”
So I called in my fifteen-year old daughter, gave her similar misdirected instructions and got the report that it “feels as though — oh, sort of like it had orange juice spilled on it.”
The thing is, trying to describe a tactile sensation is extremely difficult. And this isn’t any ordinary sensation; it’s been described by a highly trained adult as “rather like thick grease — slippery yet sticky.”
Try describing the difference between the flavor of a peach and a banana sometime.
Campbell brought the analyzer to parties and let the guests play with it the majority of them got a reading of 45 for lead when the plate felt “tacky.” In a slightly more controlled experiment, one of the women trying it felt a twinge of fear and anxiety that would cause her to stop using the machine, but when she stopped, she always stopped at the correct reading.
Campbell determined that using the machine is something you have to be “up” for and depends quite a bit on the operator’s disposition at the time of use.
