Famed writer Kenneth Roberts was avid Dowser

Excerpted for dowsing related content:


Roberts also had an eccentric side. Toward the end of his career, he befriended Henry Gross of Biddeford, a retired Maine game warden and amateur water dowser. The two used dowsing sticks to search for water and decide where to build the large pond on Roberts' property.

Roberts became so enthralled with dowsing that he went on to write three nonfiction books on the subject. Roberts and Gross even went into business together, with landowners paying them to pass their forked sticks over maps of their property in order to find gem stones, petroleum and other valuable commodities.

Roberts was ridiculed at the time for his dowsing advocacy, and, to the extent that his work lives on today, it is through his historical fiction. Mills, one of the partners seeking to sell the estate, said he had tried to read a few of Roberts' books on dowsing but found them unrewarding.

"His writing is tedious, as far as I'm concerned," he said. "He's very difficult to read."

Roberts' interest in dowsing may have been an offshoot from his main work, but Butler said his approach was consistent.

"Whenever Roberts attacked something, he was passionate about it," she said.

To read the full article : http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/4061297.html

Although researchers have limited access to Roberts's diaries, there are no restrictions on the rest of the Roberts collection. One segment of the material that has fascinated even persons with little interest in Kenneth Roberts is the author's voluminous files on water dowsing. Roberts first became interested in dowsing --the controversial practice of finding underground water by means of a forked stick -- sometime in the late 1930s when he was building his stone house on his Kennebunkport estate. He soon became a passionate advocate of dowsing, and with Henry Gross, a retired Maine game warden and expert dowser, traveled around the world proselytizing for the art of water divining and helping people locate water.
By 1950 the two men were besieged with requests for Henry Gross's dowsing services. Since the game warden's retirement income was only $61.48 a month, Roberts sought to provide a steady income for his friend. Thus, in 1950 they formed 'Water Unlimited.' The organization's prospectus -- 'sent only to persons who asked for help' -- reads in part:



<BLOCKQUOTE>
Water Unlimited, Inc., a corporation of the State of Maine, has been formed to enable seriously-interested persons to seek Henry's help, to stimulate scientific interest in the further development of water dowsing, and to encourage those who have this latent ability -- and there are many -- to improve their technique through practice and study so that they may become dependable and valuable. . . . [Kenneth Robert's] only interests in Water Unlimited are to see that Henry Gross receives a proper return for inestimably valuable services, and to make sure that his future dowsing experiences are accurately recorded and preserved. 21 </BLOCKQUOTE>



To ensure that his dowsing experiences were accurately recorded and preserved and 'to prove to scientists that [dowsing] IS possible,' 22 Roberts wrote three books: Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod (1951), The Seventh Sense (1953), and the posthumously published Water Unlimited (1957). Manuscripts and/or typescripts of these three volumes are in Baker Library, as well as many related items that Roberts gathered during his years of dowsing research. This material includes books, articles, clippings, scrapbooks, transcripts of talks and interviews Roberts gave on dowsing, correspondence, notebooks, and records of his and Henry Gross's dowsing cases. 23
As one might imagine, Roberts faced a largely skeptical American public when talking or writing about water divining (he noted on his personal copy of The Seventh Sense that the book's subtitle should read: 'Or How to Lose Friends & Alienate People'). Newspaper, magazine, and book writers regarded Gross and him as 'fair game,' and the two were often publicly mocked and ridiculed. Bergen Evans wrote in The Spoor of Spooks and Other Nonsense that Roberts believed Gross to have 'rhabdomantic powers which, if only recognized and utilized, would flood the earth with life-giving waters and cause the deserts to blossom like the rose.' 24 In 1952 the American Philosophical Society gave 'a royal roasting to historical novelist Kenneth Roberts for championing water-finding by means of a hooked-stick 'divining-rod' -- a technique known as "dowsing."' 25 In an article for Harper's Magazine entitled 'Dowsing Is Nonsense,' Thomas M. Riddick asserted that Roberts's 'illogical and unscientific conjecture may do real harm.' 26 After Roberts received an advance copy of the article, he fired off an angry letter to an editor at Harper's, in which he referred to Riddick as 'a son-of-a-bitch,' and denounced the essay as 'pretty shoddy stuff to appear in a magazine of Harper's reputation.' 27
Not only did Roberts encounter derision in the public press, but even most of his friends had little use for his dowsing crusade. Herbert Faulkner West admitted that he 'always regretted that [Roberts] ever got mixed up with it,' 28 and believed that the author's three dowsing books 'were written with the zeal of a fanatical crusader, and with a little too much readiness to damn anybody, with an irascible kind of petulance, who wouldn't accept immediately the mysterious powers of Mr. Gross.' 29 Arthur Hamilton Gibbs, another of Roberts's close friends, theorized that Roberts's obsession with dowsing was sort of a 'literary holiday' for the author, and that Roberts may have 'wrote himself out' after completing Oliver Wiswell (published in 1940) and almost certainly after finishing Lydia Bailey (1947). 30 Roberts's last novel, Boon Island, was published in 1956, and neither it nor The Battle of Cowpens, published two months after his death, rank with his major works.
Despite the misgivings of his friends, Roberts remained a dowsing advocate until his death, and his books and letters record the dozens of instances when he and Henry Gross located water for individuals and businesses. His devotion to this cause is reflected in one of his last memorandums, written the month he died and now preserved in Baker Library: 'I can do more good to my country by writing about my dowsing experiences than I can by writing novels, no matter how historically accurate they may be.'
Although Roberts paid little attention to historical research throughout the 1950s, two months before he died his many vivid dramatizations of history earned him a special Pulitzer Prize 'for his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history.' This citation-part of Dartmouth's Roberts collection-serves as a reminder that Kenneth Roberts's works were not only models of historical writing and accuracy, but also enjoyable to read. As John Tebbel declared: 'A generation of Americans owes a debt to Kenneth Roberts. He gave them an accurate picture of scenes from the nation's beginnings and educated them about aspects of our origins in a way that made many of them, at least, converts to the enjoyment and understanding of history.' 31 And since Kenneth Roberts was passionately in love with early American history all his life, it is appropriate that subsequent generations of Americans can study his papers, books, and research material at the college which offered him, in his words, 'literary re-birth, resuscitation, rehabilitation!' 32

Sceptic Thomas M. Riddick qouted April 24, 1952

Quote :

Science and scientists have been in error in the past and will continue to err in the future. The road of progress in science is by no means a super highway running straight towards truth.

Henry Gross, while sitting in Kennebunkport, Maine, located three well sites on a
map of Bermuda and described accurately the depth to drill, the quality of water, and the quantity
per minute which each well would produce. At that time Bermuda had gone “three hundred
and forty years without drinking water” except for the rain that could be caught by various
means. A plaque on a wall in Kennebunkport, Maine, reads:

IN THIS ROOM
OCT. 22ND, 1949, HENRY GROSS
DOWSED THREE FRESH-WATER DOMES
(ROYAL BARRACKS, JENNINGS, CLAYHOUSE)
ON A MAP OF BERMUDA,
AN ISLAND ON WHICH NO POTABLE SPRING-WATER
SUPPOSEDLY EXISTED.
IN BERMUDA, DEC. 7,1949,
HENRY FOUND THE DOMES AS DOWSED
IN KENNEBUNKPORT....
A DAILY 63,360 GALLONS

Then there was the story about the Association for Research and Enlightenment at Virginia Beach. They have done studies on extra-sensory perception, and they told about a famous dowser named Henry Gross. Gross lived in Maine and they sent him a map. They said there were six cypress trees in an area marked on the map. They challenged Gross to mark their locations.
He correctly spotted all six. No problem. But he also found cypress tree number seven which the association didn't even know about.

Ted Kaufman, a retired public relations executive living in New York, has worked with New
York State Rangers using his dowsing abilities to determine whether lost persons were dead or
alive and to locate them on a map.

The first person to discover that dowsing could be done
over maps was Abbe Alexis Mermet, a French priest, around the turn of the century. “Contacted
through transatlantic mail by monks desperately seeking underground water for their
monastery in the mountains of Colombia, Mermet marked a potential
drilling site on a map of the monastery grounds which, when drilled, produced more than the water required.”


Critics ?

European doctors sometimes use a pendulum as a dowsing tool for diagnostic purposes. They pass it over the patient’s body to see where the problem is. If the bodily part is healthy, it swings clockwise; if not, it moves counterclockwise. The practice has been banned in the US by a Pure Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

The French Abbe Alexis Mermer believed dowsing is a science. At the request of the Pope, he dowsed archeological sites and found dozens of missing people. Abbe Alex Bouly, also a dowser, coined the term “radiesthesia” hoping that this word would make the art scientifically acceptable ridding of its “occult” implications.

The Marines used dowsing successfully during the Viet Nam War to locate underground mines, mortars, booby traps and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army tunnels.The tool the Marines used was two pieces of coat hangar wire. The Army Corps of Engineers used seismic tunnel locators. They drilled holes into the ground, set charges in them and measured ground echoes from the blasts in order to locate tunnels. While the instruments could not map tunnels from the ground surface, they were around 50% accurate in finding them. US Marine dowsers were selected according to their potential ability to dowse and were trained in the art. The dowsers could map tunnels and were 95% accurate in finding them.