Dowsing triumphs

by Jack Stackhouse
(Aztec NM)

Years ago, my father worked as a plumber for the city of Philadelphia. He relied on dowsing to reveal the location of buried pipes and wires.
On a particularly ambitious project, he disputed the civil engineer who had marked the location of a water main from blue prints provided by public works.
My father had already dowsed and marked the location a week before they brought out the heavy equipment. However the markings the engineer placed were offset by six feet from where my father had marked.
Needless to say the engineer got his way and the backhoe punctured the main flooding the entire site washing away all but the outermost markers. They tried to blame my father for the error by saying his markers (right over the main)confused the operator as to the proper dig location, but in the end he was vindicated revealing the discrepancy on the blueprint.
The accounts of the high accuracy of dowsing over more accepted and expensive methods are many, so why is dowsing still marginalized and regarded as superstition, or fraud?