water and minerals. Having an astounding success rate
of 90 percent, Penrose was considered to be a valuable
employee.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, a clergyman by the
name of Abbe Alexis Mermet helped many people in
France and Switzerland by finding water and healing
people. He also helped the police find missing people.
He had a very high success rate. Mermet believed that
his clairvoyant powers, combined with a pendulum and
a map, enabled him to trace a missing person. He
frequently used map dowsing to locate those lost people,
but he also came up with accurate details that had
nothing to do with maps.
A woman asked him to help locate her missing
brother. The police had gotten nowhere. She provided
Abbe Mermet with a photo of the young man that he
held in one hand while using the pendulum with the
other. Keeping his questions to ones that could be
answered yes or no, the Abbe determined that the
brother was dead. He described where that body could
be found, how he had been killed, a general description
of the man who did it, and why. The police found the
body exactly where the Abbe said it would be, with a
knife wound in the heart. His empty purse was
discovered nearby in the River Sarine. The brother had
obviously been a victim of a robbery.
After World War I, Abbe Mermet used his map
dowsing to help the French government locate
unexploded German shells. Although a few hundred
years earlier Abbe Mermet would have been burned at
the stake by the Church, the Vatican recognized him for
his work in May, 1935. He invented a special type of
pendulum made of several different metals, the top of
which could be unscrewed and tiny samples of the