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The Munich Barn Experiments on Dowsing

Also Known As The Scheunenexperiment (German) · The Munich dowsing trials

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The trials are the largest test of dowsing ever mounted, and the reason they are still argued over is that the investigators and their critic drew opposite conclusions from one dataset. The design was clean. A pipe was moved beneath the floor of a barn between runs, and neither the dowser working above nor the attendant with them was told where it lay. Most participants performed no better than chance, which the final report conceded. The dispute is entirely about the handful of dowsers whose scores that report singled out, and about whether the statistics used to single them out were settled before the data were seen or fitted to them afterwards.

Facts
Disputed
Replication Status
The successful subset has never been reproduced. Enright reported that it disappeared under conventional analysis; Betz and colleagues replied that the effect persists, and Enright answered again. 1
J. Wagner, Hans-Dieter Betz and H. L. Koenig ran the Munich barn experiments on dowsing in 1987 and 1988, testing more than five hundred dowsers across more than ten thousand double-blind trials in which a water pipe on the floor below was moved between runs to positions set at random, unknown to the dowser or the attendant. Their 1990 final report to the German federal funding agency identified a small subset of trials with results the investigators read as better than chance. J. T. Enright's Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments (1999) re-examined the same trial data with different statistical grouping and argued that subset was a product of testing many subgroups after the fact rather than a real localized effect, since no equivalent subset recovers the same pattern in later or independent data. The method on both sides is statistical reanalysis of the same trial archive, and both sides published without either withdrawing, keeping the exchange live. It is not evenly balanced: no later trial has recovered the successful subset, which is why the atlas records the underlying dowsing claim itself as debunked even while this exchange remains debated.
Method
Design
Dowsers worked on the upper floor of a barn while a water pipe on the floor below was moved between runs to positions set at random, with neither the dowser nor the attendant told where it lay. 1
Sample Size
More than 500 dowsers across more than 10,000 double-blind trials, run in 1987 and 1988 1
Investigators
J. Wagner, Hans-Dieter Betz and H. L. Koenig, whose final report went to the German federal funding agency in 1990 1
Position Profile
Principal Critic
J. T. Enright, who reanalysed the same data and reported that the positive result rested on statistical methods fitted to it, and that the effect did not survive conventional analysis. 1
Learn More
A Barn, a Moving Pipe, and Ten Thousand Trials

The design deserves credit before the argument about the result begins, because it is the most serious attempt anyone has made to test dowsing under controlled conditions.

Dowsers worked on the upper floor of a barn. Beneath them, on the floor below, a water pipe was moved between runs to a position set at random. The dowser walked the upper floor and marked where they judged the pipe to lie. Neither the dowser nor the attendant with them knew where it had been placed, which is what makes the trials double blind rather than merely blind, and it closes the route by which an experimenter's knowledge can leak to a subject through posture, hesitation or a glance.

The scale matched the seriousness. More than five hundred dowsers took part across 1987 and 1988, and more than ten thousand individual trials were run. The programme was funded by the German federal government, which is unusual for a test of this kind and is part of why the results carried weight when they appeared.

The reason a design like this matters is that dowsing is easy to test and easy to appear to pass. In ordinary conditions a dowser has the ground, the vegetation, local knowledge and the reactions of the people watching, and a practitioner may draw on all of them without being aware of doing so. Removing the target from sight and from anyone present is what separates the claim from everything else that could produce a hit.

One Dataset, and Two Opposite Readings of It

The final report to the funding agency, by Wagner, Betz and Koenig in 1990, conceded the general result: most of the several hundred participants did not perform well. What it went on to argue is that a small number had scored at rates chance could scarcely account for, and that this subset demonstrated a real effect in a few gifted individuals.

That subset carried the entire positive claim, and it is where the disagreement lives.

J. T. Enright reanalysed the same data and concluded that the positive finding rested on statistical treatment fitted to the results after they were in hand. His argument is the standard one against selecting a high-scoring group from a large sample: with several hundred participants, a handful will score well for the same reason a handful of coins in a large batch land heads several times running, and singling them out afterwards and testing them as though they had been nominated in advance turns noise into a result. Under conventional analysis, he reported, the effect was not there. Betz replied that it persists.

Neither side has been able to close the argument, and the reason is that the test that would close it has not been run. If the successful dowsers were genuinely gifted, they could be named in advance and tested again, and the effect should reappear. It has not been reproduced.

The atlas records the disagreement rather than a winner, because both readings of this dataset have been defended in print by people who worked on it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

1987, Years

The Munich Barn Experiments on Dowsing, an experimental series, is dated here from 1987 to 1990. Whether dowsers working on the upper floor of a barn could locate a water pipe whose position on the floor below had been set at random, with neither dowser nor attendant knowing where it lay.

Source Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich ExperimentsJ. T. Enright
1990, Years

The Munich Barn Experiments on Dowsing ran to 1990, having begun in 1987.

Source Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich ExperimentsJ. T. Enright

Studied

Dowsing, Psi Phenomena

The largest controlled test of dowsing ever mounted, and the origin of the claim that a minority of dowsers perform above chance. The trials themselves are not in dispute. What is disputed is the investigators' claim that a small subset of dowsers scored beyond chance, which did not survive reanalysis, and summaries of the dowsing literature routinely conflate the two.

Source Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich ExperimentsJ. T. Enright
Sources
1. Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments
J. T. Enright, Skeptical Inquirer, 1999
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