Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [174]
We were now ready for the flamboyant Professor Borga from Trento. He had carried on at great length about vast destructive rivers he had discovered beneath Florence, responsible, he told us, for the flooding of that city. He wanted to tap into these rivers and divert the water from the art treasures. Borga claimed he could detect "almost any flow" of water and said he was also sensitive to oil. However, when he buzzed about trying to find the natural water in the plot, he found nothing. (We wondered what had happened to the two underground torrents Fontana had detected.)
Borga used two hinged, stiff sticks that whirled about in his hands, raising calluses at the lower edge of his hands along the little fingers and palms. From a straight-up position, the hinge went down and away from his body, arced in toward him, then moved toward his face and away and outward to repeat its circular motion. Occasionally it would stop and reverse its direction. Pressing the arms together while holding this device produces the tension characteristic of the forked stick or Fontana's flexible stick. The system is unstable; any small change in wrist position or tension causes the gadget to rotate. Such small impetuses are easily and involuntarily introduced to the device by the dowser.
Only two dowsers, Fontana and Stanziola, decided there was "natural" water on the site. Thus they disagree with the other two, who said there was no such water there. As seen in this diagram, Fontana and Stanziola even disagree with each other about where this water was.
The professor's sticks whirled about like an amusement park attraction. He stepped around the plot like a pinstriped crane in mating season, uttering short commands to the assistant, who inserted pegs for him, and laughed and mumbled to himself, obviously delighted by visions of wealth and fame. It is interesting that, in the third test, Borga provided proof of the idiocy of such beliefs and established beyond doubt that dowsing is all in the imagination of the performer. The five-thousand liters in the truck supplying the water at that moment ran out. As Borga headed toward the finish, the engineer signaled to me to look at the reservoir, and I saw that the water had ceased flowing. I cautioned him to say nothing, and Borga continued. The sound of the pump was such that he could not tell the flow had ceased. After Borga had proceeded a bit farther, we told him that the water was "running out." Immediately his sticks began slowing down and he cried out to us to notice that his powers had detected this fact.
Actually, this was the most important moment of the entire dowsing experiment. Borga had been certain (he said he was 100 percent certain) that he had plotted the three paths. His sticks reacted very strongly, and he even "adjusted" one of his attempts, moving the sticks as little as an inch or so to ensure accuracy. But Borga was detecting nothing. There were no pipes there, water-filled or not. And—most important—he had continued to detect water, in the wrong place and direction, even after the flow had ceased! I felt no guilt in not having told him that the water had run out, since he had already failed the test spectacularly.
Borga hot on the trail.
Borga's unusual dowsing rods: two stiff sticks, hinged with a pin. The apparatus allegedly whirls around when water is detected.
The surveyor plots the position of the pegs that were placed by Professor Borga. Although Borga adjusted these pegs carefully, shifting them as little as two centimeters for "fine tuning," he was fully eight feet from the nearest water.
Borga retired, after making a statement to the TV cameras in which he expressed his confidence in the results. Next up was Stanziola, a young man who turned out to be a pupil of Borga. His attempt was to be