Just as Strong on the 12th Floor

Two bent wires and a slow walk: that, Dr. George Egely wrote, is all it takes to find out whether you react to “zones”. Their most important use, in his view, was at home, and in blocks of flats, he reported, the effect is just as strong on the twelfth floor as on the ground floor.

Unlike the earlier files, this one is an explanation, not an event: a seven-page section of Dr. György (George) Egely's book Parajelenségek (“Paranormal Phenomena”, 1993), titled “Varázsol-e a vessző?” (“Does the rod work magic?”). It follows his passage on street lamps that go out near people thinking hard, the subject of FILE 002. In a later book he added a scene of his own from decades earlier: a whole school class walking a long corridor with bent wires, and the rods stirring for every second or third pupil at roughly the same spot. Here you will find his instructions, the twelfth floor in his own words, that corridor, and what controlled tests have found since.

THE RECORDTwo wires and a slow walk

People have walked the land with a rod in their hands since antiquity, Egely notes, looking for water veins, pipes or cables underground. His instructions were to take two L-shaped wires of any material, since the wire is only an aid, to grip the short ends upright in the fists so that the long ends point forward like horns, about shoulder width apart, and to walk slowly. Normally the wires stay parallel. In sensitive hands they now and then close or open, and then something at that spot differs from its surroundings.

The person, not the rod. For a long time, he writes, people believed the “magic power” was in the rod. Measurements and more careful observation, in his account, clearly dispelled that: the person signals, and the wire, stick or pendulum only displays it. Over water veins, electric cables and the like, measurements showed that muscle tone changes; the arm turns slightly, and the L-shaped rod magnifies the movement and makes it visible.

Beyond the flat. Very sensitive professionals, he writes, can tell ten metres down where water veins run and where to drill a well, and can find ore, larger cavities and thicker cables the same way; in every case, in his explanation, the electrical conductivity of the ground changes and the body reports it. After rain, he warns, the rod also responds to puddles, so only a zone that runs on over a longer stretch means a vein or a cable. American soldiers, he adds, regularly used the method in the Vietnam War to find the Vietnamese army's tunnels, because they could find no instrument that worked well for it.

THE PUZZLEThe same map on every floor

The method's real and most important use, Egely writes, would be inside homes: mapping the zones he considered harmful, where it is risky to put a bed or a desk. A water vein may run under a flat, but much more often, he says, the cause is the building's reinforced concrete or iron beams, which have the same effect. His evidence is the housing estate: in multi-storey blocks, the zone maps of flats stacked above one another are exactly the same.

It is therefore very doubtful, he concludes, that this is radiation in the true sense. Much more likely the human body, at least in a good part of people, is sensitive to the electrical conductivity of its surroundings, above all where it changes drastically. The book does not say who made the measurements, with what, in which buildings or how many; it gives the result only, and he notes himself that no official surveys of the zones had yet been made in Hungary.

Coils, nets and concrete. On protection he is blunt: the shielding coils and nets one reads about are highly doubtful, most likely well-meaning amateur attempts or quackery. The surest course, in his view, is to move away from the spots he calls harmful, which he admits is hard in a housing estate flat, where the reinforced concrete puts such a zone almost every metre.

EGELY'S NOTESWho reacts, and what he believed it does

Not everyone reacts to the same thing, he continues: some people to changes in electric fields, some only to magnetic ones, some to radioactive or strong high-frequency radiation. Living things behave differently in the zones too: “Dogs, for example, avoid the zones, but cats like them.” In the surveys so far, he writes, about half of people can use the “magic rod”; for the other half the results are always contradictory, and a small fraction can use it extremely precisely.

How the zones act on people was not yet known, Egely wrote, but he was certain that in sensitive people the effect works very slowly, mainly on the immune system: usually sleeplessness, weakness and fatigue, and over the long term some kind of illness, mainly in the organs that lie in such zones all the time, above all where zones cross. Some people, in his account, could live their whole lives in what he called a harmful zone and stay perfectly healthy, while in others pain or inflammation appeared within a few weeks. “In fact we can be glad if someone is not sensitive to this ‘earth radiation’,” he adds, “because then it does not matter where they work or what kind of zone their bed is in.” This is his view as he wrote it in 1993, not medical advice. Nothing in the evidence presented in this article confirms these health conclusions, and a rod's movement alone cannot show whether a bed is harmful to anyone.

He recommends that everyone try the wires at least once. Anyone who really wants to be sure the effect exists can ask at least ten friends or acquaintances to try: at least one fairly sensitive person, he writes, will be among them. He ends the section on the difficulty:

EGELY'S LENSThe physical end of the strange

Egely introduces the wires as an effect that proves, “in a way fairly easy to check and well demonstrable”, that our interaction with various fields may be important, and earlier in the same book he calls the rod probably the result of known but very weak physical effects (“everyone senses weak fields”). As we read him, this placed dowsing at the physical, explainable end of the phenomena his book collects.

THE 2008 BOOKA corridor full of pupils

Egely came back to the wires in Vízautók… antigravitáció… (“Water cars… antigravity…”, 2008), in plainer words. What moves the rods, he now writes, is “nothing other than an unconscious muscle reaction”, and you have to stay relaxed to feel it. The reaction shows in only every third or fourth person (in 1993 he had put it at about half of people), and he still calls “earth radiation” a poor name. Many people, he notes, offer to find harmful zones with a rod, “but with these subjective methods we can never be truly certain”. As a simple alternative, he describes a test of his own:

One precaution was good: the pupils could not see one another, so no one could copy the pupil before them, and by his account the reason for the spot came out only afterwards. The book does not say when or where it happened, how many pupils walked, how their passes were recorded, or whether anything in the corridor marked the spot; told decades later, it is a demonstration rather than a controlled trial. He drew a practical idea from it: such a simple “test track” could pick out the people especially sensitive to the effect.

TODAYWhat the tests found

Who moves the rods. Egely and his critics agree on this much: the dowser's own hands move the rods. In 1833 the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul reported, from his own experiments, that a hand-held pendulum swings less as the support under the arm is moved closer to the hand, and dies away when the holder is blindfolded. In 1852 the physiologist William B. Carpenter called such movements “ideo-motor”, made by an idea without any act of will, and counted the movements of the divining rod among them. As we read it, Egely's “unconscious muscle reaction” describes the same kind of movement. The accounts part on what sets it off: for Egely, a physical change in the surroundings; in the ideomotor explanation, what the dowser expects, or notices without knowing it.

The tests. The largest test we know of, paid for by the German research ministry, was run in a barn near Munich in the late 1980s, and its set-up speaks to the twelfth floor: a water pipe was moved along a ten-metre line on the ground floor while the dowsers walked the floor above. Results were reported for 43 dowsers, out of about 500 who took part in pilot tests. The researchers concluded that a few had been remarkably successful and that a real core of the phenomenon could be regarded as proven. James T. Enright reanalysed the data and reached the opposite verdict: taken together the results look random, and the best dowsers did not repeat their success in their other series; the authors defended their analysis. In a smaller test near Kassel in 1990, organised by the German sceptics' society GWUP, 19 dowsers each tried 30 times to tell whether water was flowing through a pipe buried 50 cm deep: they were right 52 per cent of the time, against 50 by chance, and none reached the agreed pass mark.

The zones and the body. The study closest to his health claims was published in 2008 by Norbert Leitgeb and René Lukas of Graz University of Technology. In a double-blind design they scanned an area of 35 square metres in half-metre steps, measuring skin resistance, reaction time and heart rate variability in 43 volunteers, sceptics excluded, while five experienced dowsers independently marked the zones they found in the same area. Neither the measurements nor their match with the dowsers' maps showed statistically significant differences. The study measured short-term reactions, not long-term illness.

Vietnam. The Marine Corps' own history of 1968 records that at Khe Sanh, watching for enemy tunnelling, the Marines monitored seismic detectors, listened to steel stakes with borrowed stethoscopes “and even employed divining rods”. The countermines they dug where tunnelling seemed possible found no enemy tunnels, a result for all their methods together, not for the rods alone. We found no record of regular or systematic use.

The twelfth floor. We found no published measurement that compares dowsing zones floor by floor. What can be measured is that a building's steel and other structures change the magnetic field indoors; one study of indoor positioning found that the field can also change markedly with the height at which it is measured. That neither confirms nor refutes his twelfth floor: it does not show that people sense such variations with a rod, or that they match the zones he describes.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKSomething anyone can try

Egely's own instrument is not a dowsing rod and was not made to find zones. What it shares with this section of his book is the idea of a phenomenon simple enough for anyone to try with their own hands. His vitality meter, still made today as the Egely Wheel, is a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and the wheel's movement observable through direct experience. If the files in this series make you want to try it, the wheel is made and sold by us.

Sources

1. György Egely, Parajelenségek / Elhallgatott találmányok, K.u.K. Kiadó, Budapest, 1993; Vízautók… antigravitáció…, Budapest, 2008.
2. M.-E. Chevreul, “Lettre à M. Ampère, sur une classe particulière de mouvemens musculaires”, Revue des Deux Mondes, 2nd series, vol. 2, 258–266 (1833). wikisource.org; English translation in Skeptical Inquirer 25(4), 35–39 (2001). centerforinquiry.org
3. W. B. Carpenter, “On the influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition”, Proceedings of the Royal Institution 1, 147–153 (1852). archive.org
4. H. Wagner, H.-D. Betz, H. L. König, Schlußbericht 01 KB8602, Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie (1990); H. L. König, H.-D. Betz, Erdstrahlen? Der Wünschelruten-Report, Munich (1989). J. T. Enright, “Water dowsing: the Scheunen experiments”, Naturwissenschaften 82, 360–369 (1995), doi:10.1007/BF01134560; “Testing dowsing: the failure of the Munich experiments”, Skeptical Inquirer 23(1), 39–46 (1999). skepticalinquirer.org; the reply: H.-D. Betz et al., “Dowsing reviewed: the effect persists”, Naturwissenschaften 83, 272–275 (1996), and Enright, “Dowsers lost in a barn”, same issue, 275–277.
5. R. König, J. Moll, A. Sarma, “Wünschelruten-Test in Kassel”, Skeptiker 1/1991; English translation. geotech1.com
6. N. Leitgeb, R. Lukas, “Should hospitals protect from geopathogenic zones?”, Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 158(1–2), 42–48 (2008), doi:10.1007/s10354-007-0450-6. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
7. J. Shulimson, L. A. Blasiol, C. R. Smith, D. A. Dawson, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Defining Year, 1968, History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington (1997), “The Siege of Khe Sanh”, p. 269. archive.org
8. D. Hanley, A. S. Dantas de Oliveira, X. Zhang, D. H. Kim, Y. Wei, T. Bretl, “The impact of height on indoor positioning with magnetic fields”, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement 70 (2021), doi:10.1109/TIM.2021.3059317. ieee-dataport.org
9. egelywheel.com: “Invented in 1994 by Dr. George Egely and refined over decades.” egelywheel.com

AI-assisted research, writing and illustration. Edited by Egely Wheel.