Digum,
I won't quote your post here, but you obviously put a lot of time and thought into it.
My question wasn't poised directly towards you, but to all of the dowsers here that have made claims of finding amazing things with their rods. Yes, I do own a digital camera and have posted finds here in the past, but my finds tend towards average, with the typical newer silver coins, wheats, Indians, jewelry, etc. But, I live an a part of the country that is sparsely populated and truly amazing finds are few and far between. Believe me, if I dug up a trove of large cents tomorrow, there would be pics plastered all over the site.
You listed many very obvious reasons why one would not be able to post pictures here, or why one would choose not to post their finds. But do you honestly believe that one of these applies to every dowser on this forum? Really?
Even if I don't post pictures often, I guarantee you 20 or 30 other people using detectors post finds on a daily basis. And time of the day or night you can go into the metal detecting area and find multiple pictures of recent finds made with detectors.
Why does this not happen in the dowsing forum?
Also, I noted several instances where you refer to my lack of detecting experience. There's no basis for these claims whatsoever. I could do what you did and rattle off a list of finds as long as your arm. In fact, I could turn around and make the same claims about you since, as you pointed out, you choose not to make your finds known. If it was demanded of me, I could break out the camera and post pictures of the finds from my last few outings with no difficulty. Name me one dowser that can say this.
What is irritating is the self-importance dowsers place on themselves and their hobby. They carry on and on about how intelligent they are, how the level them work on is so much higher than most everyone else (whatever that means,) how sensitive they are to their surroundings, how what they do is connected to the Earth/Sun/Moon/Space etc, but most importantly how what they do seems to defy all laws of nature and logic.
Since you seem to have such a great grasp of my previous posts, then you obviously know why I came to this forum to begin with. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that. Needless to say, because I have a logical mind, the answers I was given made no sense, and the more I read and studied and attempted to grasp the concept of dowsing, the stranger the answers became before I came to the realization that not one dowser here knows what it is they are doing.
They can't tell you why dowsing should work and they can't tell you how dowsing should work. Their explanations are filled with pseudo-scientific language, minerals doing what no mineral is able to do, crazy methods for finding their target by placing a sample in their shoe/hat/ear.... But here's the kicker! Everything they say, they either contradict themselves the next day, or another dowser does the contradicting. Then, to top the whole thing off, they love to sit and accuse metal detectorists of wasting time digging things on the surface, when there are apparently thousands of caves far below the surface of the Earth filled with gold bars......
Of course, they can never recover these treasures for one reason or another....
And I think that's the main thrust of my problem with dowsers. They love to go on and on about the amazing finds they've made, stating without question that the signal they got in the field today was 3 tons of gold buried 50 feet down, but they never recover them. Even minor claims, like "I found a gold ring and 10 silver coins" are never backed up with anything. I can guarantee that if I had the audacity to post that I dug 2 gold coins and 9 silver rings, there would be a picture to prove this! But luckily dowsers never seem to have this burden placed upon them. That, and the fact that nothing they do has any basis in science.
