If you live some place where you can drill 30ft almost anywhere and find water, it works amazingly.

I got it to work with willow branches while crossing a known irrigation culver on my farm

Absolutely not. If it could lead one to water, you'd hear stories of people finding concerts or finding people buried alive. Since people are mostly water, there should be a bunch of reports of desperate people stumbling into concerts rather than liquid salvation. People are always dying of non-dowsing deaths at concerts, so it has to be false.

No, it's pseudoscience.

Dowsing is real. I just don't think it's effective. A long diamond drill works. I've seen this done many times. My own well is hundreds of feet deep.

It may well be the turning of the rods loosely in the hand acts as a 'random walk', and it turns out that is the most locally optimal algorithm for finding water given a certain radius.

If its true, then anything that provides fine and randomized directional feedback should, hypothetically, replicate the effect.

I don’t know if dowsing is real, but I used to have a leak locator who used a pair of “witching rods” to find water lines. The rods were just a couple of brass brazing rods bent at a 90 degree angle. I thought he was full of shit the first time he pulled them out, but this guy never failed to locate a water line. We must have been on dozens of jobs together, and I even tried to use his rods a few times but they never seemed to work for me. I was a skeptic but this guy made me a believer.

It works to make the dowser money.

Yes. My Granny was quite successful as was my Aunt....brought in quite a bit of spare cash on the occasion when someone needed a well drilled, which wasn't that often.

I knew a crew that missed 3 times, then hired a well witcher who used 2 sticks. Not only did he nail it, but that well got the most volume water in the entire neighborhood, which was known to be problematic.

I've never tried it but we used to take two Pin flags bend them and hold them aiming out left and right and find underground cables, pipes, gas lines. You could not hold them from crossing each other, amazingly strong pull.