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Mr. Henry Gross of Biddleford, Maine – from The Wisconsin engineer Volume 69
Identifier
025432
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Smith, Robert (ed.) / The Wisconsin engineer Volume 69, Number 1 (October 1964)
The third and most important person is Mr. Henry Gross of Biddleford, Maine. Mr. Gross is mentioned in Who's Who: "Gross, Henry, water dowser ... Located Bermuda's first fresh water underground springs, ...".
Mr. Gross is the subject of three books, (Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod, 1951; The Seventh Sense, 1953; and Water Unlimited, 1957) all by the late Mr. Kenneth Roberts who turned from historical novels such as Northwest Passage, to documentary accounting of Gross and his exploits.
Gross, a retired Maine game warden, was only a second rate dowser until he came under the tutelage of Roberts. They incorporated as Water Unlimited, Inc., and became quite a controversial topic throughout the north-eastern region of this country.
Robert's three books describe in detail their adventures and accomplishments as professional dowsers.
Throughout these books Roberts attempted to leave the impression of not being motivated by desire for money, but rather, motivated by an obsession to prove to the world that water witching actually works. Under the guidance of Roberts, Gross discovered that he had tremendous and fantastic powers. He was able to determine where underground flowing water existed, where it went to, where it came from, what the quantity of flow was, what the depth was, what the quality was, and what the quantity of flow was during the driest part of the year.
Not only was he able to locate these points by standing over them, but he could also roughly locate them from a distant hill or high spot.
He was also able to locate these points from several thousand miles away just by witching over a map.
The reader will probably have the typical reaction here: "I could possibly be made to believe that a dowser could find water when it's under his feet; but don't expect me to believe that he can find it from a distance, or by just looking at a map. That's going too far!"
One classic example of Mr. Gross' dowsing is worthy of discussion here. Roberts had done some of his historical novel writings while living in Bermuda and was aware of the critical water situation that existed there. The island's entire supply of water came from trapped rain water; either by roof tanks, catch basins, or scattered underground drainage discoveries. When a drought occurred, the island's water had to be imported. This seemed to be an ideal spot for Gross to show his stuff, as geologists were practically unanimous in agreeing that there was positively no fresh water anywhere on the island of Bermuda.
Gross witched four spots on the map of Bermuda while in Maine, and then later pinpointed them during a trip to Bermuda. At this point Gross and Roberts decided to dig the wells and persuaded the local government to finance the operation. They met with considerable red tape, faulty equipment, and inefficiency, but finally succeeded in digging three of the four wells, the results being very close to those predicted. The fourth well was not drilled because Gross witched it as unfit to drink.
By coincidence, during the drilling of these wells, Roberts "finally located" Miss Penrose (the former official dowser of British Columbia) and sent her maps of Bermuda which she distance dowsed (from Australia) and returned.
Roberts states: "Her findings, roughly speaking, correspond to Henry's (Gross), and make this Bermuda adventure, to my way of thinking, the greatest dowsing experiment on record. Two water dowsers, working from opposite ends of the earth and using two different methods, (Miss Penrose witched over a map with only her hands instead of the conventional dowsing rod) have come up with the same answers concerning a small and suposedly waterless island in the middle of the Atlantic!"