Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments

J. T. Enright was a biologist, and this Skeptical Inquirer article reports on the 1987 to 1989 Wagner, Betz and Koenig double-blind trials of dowsing conducted in Munich, in which more than ten thousand individual dowsing trials found practitioners performing at the level chance would predict. Its strength is that it summarizes a large-scale, methodologically controlled experimental test rather than a single anecdotal case, and Enright's own analysis of the underlying data has been influential in the skeptical literature on dowsing. Its limit is that Skeptical Inquirer is an advocacy magazine for scientific skepticism rather than a peer-reviewed journal, so a claim needing the original experimental data in full detail is better sourced to the underlying Munich study itself.