web.archive.org: Stephan Riess


Staring into the valley below from the high altitude entrance to the mine shaft, Riess asked himself how water that supposedly had trickled into the earth as rain could rise through hard rock into shafts and tunnels of a mine nearly at the top of a mountain range.

The temperature, chemistry and purity of the water suggested to Riess that it must have a completely different origin than ordinary ground water considered part of the hydrologic cycle. Since none of the textbooks he had studied had referred to this seemingly entirely anomalous phenomenon, he decided to unravel this mystery.

On trips back to Europe, Riess became aware that many historic castles were built on high rocky promontories and that at the center of their courtyards were huge wells usually hand-dug into hard rock, which had supplied water for centuries.

In the North American West an important clue to the mystery disclosed by Riess came when, working late at night in a mine shaft, he heard a peculiar hissing sound, similar to that produced by a leaky air tank, accompanied by a trickling of water. What he was observing, he believed, was virgin water being liberated from ore-bearing rock by crystallization processes within the rocks themselves.

Riess finally came to the conclusion that, in various rock strata, deep in the earth, water was continually manufactured under particular conditions of temperature and pressure and forced up in rock fissures where it could be tapped and drilled.

He said in an unpublished statement in 1954:

"My discovery was put to a field test by locating and drilling many wells. The record to date from these tests is 70 producing wells out of 72 attempts, all drilled in hard rock, all located in distress areas generally considered unproductive."

In 1957, the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year declared:

"Stephan Riess of California formulated a theory that 'new water,' which never existed before, is constantly being formed within the earth by the combination of elemental hydrogen and oxygen, and that this water finds its way to the surface, can be located and tapped, to constitute a steady and unfailing new supply."

Over the years Riess improved the methodology and analysis, in the process expounding on his theory. He said:

"At no time is water static. It is a constantly changing form. It is either liquid or gas, or it is bound up in crystalline form in rocks and minerals. The cycle of gas to liquid to crystal is repeated over and over. Oxygen and hydrogen combine under the electrochemical forces of the earth to form liquid water. Not only is water being constantly formed within the earth, but also rocks, minerals and oil. What I seek is water in its liquid state."

"The water I get has to be coming from great depth because it is free of leach minerals found in water flowing through sediments. It comes up through the basalt in fissures, some from 5 to 10 and up to 20 to 30 feet wide, that go down into the earth to provide vertical aqueducts."

Riess pointed out that conventional solutions to an ever-increasing need for pure water such as dams and aqueducts were expensive and inadequate as a long term solution.

As an alternative he proposed that serious studies of water flowing in rock fissures be undertaken. He simply asked:

"Why should huge sums be spent to build pipelines over great distances when Mother Nature has created her own pipelines? It is certainly more economical to pump water vertically up 450 feet than to pump it and transport it laterally 450 miles!"

Riess in his lifetime drilled over 1,000 successful wells.

Riess' Successor And The Institute
The Riess Institute was started in 1983 by a number of individuals, including Stephan Riess himself and his successor, Morad Eghbal.

Eghbal spent ten years working with Riess to learn and practice his methods. It took Eghbal over a year of lone, constant effort to get Riess to open up and talk. Riess was not an academic scientist: he just wanted to find water for people and to prove his theory by locating and drilling wells in areas deemed impossible for finding water.

Eghbal is a U.S.-trained geologist, with a law degree specializing in resource law. He is currently the Secretary-Treasurer of the Riess Institute and the only person with whom Stephan Riess felt comfortable enough to pass on all his theories, processes and procedures to find deep-seated potable water.

Working together, Stephan Riess patiently taught Eghbal how to find water and locate wells, at first with close guidance, and later, independently.

Eghbal and the Institute were far-sighted in seeing the necessity for preserving and documenting Riess' methods and accomplishments.

To further Riess' work, the Institute for the last ten years has been conducting major research work at its Totten Field Laboratory in Massachusetts in conjunction with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other major institutions of higher learning the world over, with the goals of soon publishing important findings from their research, confirming Stephan Riess' hypothesis of earth-generated water.
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