Published in February, 1991
By Chris Barton
Australian researcher tracks reverse messages in speech
We’ve all done it at least once, just to see if it works. We’ve taken our copy of The White Album, Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust or any heavy metal record, slapped it onto the turntable and spun it around backwards in search of hidden messages. Drug use. Satanic references. “Paul is dead.”
But with the possible exception of fundamentalist Christians and their supporters hunting for the-rock ‘n’ roll boogeymen, few take seriously the notion that backwards phrases might be present in the sounds we hear, somehow seeping into our subconscious and wreaking untold havoc in our noggins.
Until 1984, Australian David Oates was among the skeptics. A heavy metal fan, Oates was working at a halfway house tor street kids, when a few of the youths he dealt with asked for his opinion on “all these Satanic messages in rock and roll.”
“And I go like, ‘Yeah, I’m sure,'” Oates recalls. “But it got me curious and I went home that night and rewound a tape player backwards simply to show these kids what a whole lot of rubbish it was. Much to my surprise, when I played the tape backwards, I heard what I thought were quite clear, precise English phrases.”
Oates was not the first to make such a “discovery”, but the ends to which he has taken his findings may be considered extreme even by the standards of his fundamentalist forebears. For Oates has not rnerely made a hobby of spinning rock records in reverse; rather, he has devoted the past seven years of his life to researching the presence ot backward messages in all forms of human speech.
The principle guiding Oates’ work with reverse speech is the notion that verbal human communication is twofold, so that as a person speaks he simultaneously creates two messages–one forward in the conscious mind, and the other backward in the unconscious mind. 
“lmbedded in the sounds of human speech once every five, 10, 15 seconds, occurs a very clear, precise, grammatically correct phrase that is communicating our real thoughts and feelings” Oates asserts. Put simply, if human speech is recorded and played backward, slowed down 10 on 15 percent, mixed in among the gibberish, you will hear very clear, precise, intelligent phrases.”
With the help of research staffs in Australia and in the United States, where he now resides, Oates has broadened his original hypothesis, taking into account the effects of emotions, second languages and individual speech patterns on speech reversals.
“Normally they come about once every 10 seconds of conversation, [but] as emotions increase, so do reversals, so that in an intense argument, they can occur once every three or four seconds. And they aren’t formed by the actual words we use in our speech; they are formed by thc sounds of our speech. It’s got nothing to do with reversing the letters of the words or the actual words. So, for example, you can find reversals in laughter or cries or deep breaths. It normally occurs around the stutterings and stammerings of speech.
“Our initial theory is that if the language being spoken at the time is English, then the reversal will be in English. If they’re [speaking] in German, then the reversal will be in German. But it also depends on how long someone’s been speaking a second language. If they’ve been speaking English for only two or three years, most of the reversals will be in their native tongue.”
Not all of Oates’ efforts have been devoted to serious research. In the course of his studies, he has also cast an occasional eye to the world of celebrity, catching from time to time what he considers to be a glimpse into the minds of the famous.
“Steve Martin was interviewed on the Larry King show a couple of months ago and someone said a joke and asked him something and he said, ‘Get fucked. I’ve had enough.’ And another time he said, ‘I don’t want to be funny. I’m sick of this’ Oates reveals. “I’ve been following the gulf crisis a bit, doing reversals on Bush talking about strategies and plans. When the war first broke, I did a lot of the early war speeches and was getting a lot of the war news before it was announced publicly in the press.”
If Oates’ field of study makes him comparable to fundamentalist Christians, his enthusiasm for his work makes him even more so. Alternately referring to reverse speech as a sixth sense,” a “real phenomenon” and a “major breakthrough,” Oates is downrighl evangelical when it comes to practical applications of his research.
Thus far, those applications have been Iimited to police work and psychological therapy, he says. In the former category, Oates claims that his expertise has directed police to murder weapons, to the accomplice to a crime and to a hidden bank account. He cannot, however, be more specific about the details of the cases, and despite his excitement about the possible role of reverse speech in police work, he says his research has yet to make any serious inroads into the field.
“I’ve only worked on four cases with the police and that’s all been very underground,” Oates explains. “They would prefer it not to be known that someone is playing their tapes backwards and hearing voices.”
As for therapy, that field is helping provide Oates with the first financial gain he has seen since he began his research. The potential for reverse speech applications in therapy is “immeasurable,” Oates says, and if the initial achievements he describes are legitimate, his expertise has been well worth the patients’ time and money.
“In one properly conducted reverse speech recording session, which will traditionally last about half an hour, we are getting very detailed and precise descriptions of how this particular theraputic problem has come about, why it is there, what benefits it is causing the individual, what harm it’s causing, and how can we go about and change it,” Oates says.
“And we are getting people who have been in therapy for seven or eight years having major, major breakthroughs after one session with Reverse Speech. One of the greatest problems with therapeutic work is ascertaining the actual cause of someone’s psychosis or someone’s problem. Reverse Speech is giving us all of that in just one quick, easy session.”
Bul is it really? Or, more to the point, does “Reverse Speech” exist at all? Oates says he has avoided widespread skepticism in the U.S. thus far by quietly rallying support, as he will attempt to do Thursday night at the Lila B. Etter Alumni Center. But with a book on his research nearing a publishing date and the publicity which will inevitibly ensue, Oates may find more critics than he expected.
One of them is UT professor Wiliiam Coker, who teaches a class on pseudoscience. Long before hearing of Oates’ research, Coker and his students had studied reverse speech, and Oates’ claims have done nothing to lessen Coker’s utter skepticism about the concept.
“That makes as much sense as saying your Social Security number is the key to your personality,” Coker argues. “When you record speech and play it back … you get a bunch of gibberish, but it sounds as if it means something. So what you basically do is tell people they’re going to hear something in all this noise, and most people are gullible enough to hear what they want to hear. This is an old idea; it just keeps getting retreaded. Because as P. T. Barnum said …”
Nonetheless, Oates stands by his research, insisting that reverse speech is a natural function of language and that it is present everywhere — in our conversations, in our laughter, and yes, even in our heavy metal. But don’t expect Oates’ theory to be of any use to fundamentalists or to the Nevada families who claimed that backwards phrases on a Judas Priest album drove their two sons to suicide.
“Yeah, on the Judas Priest album I did find reversals relating to suicide,” Oates says, “[but] Judas Priest didn’t put them there: they can’t be held responsible. But that is what the album was about forwards anyway, so there’s no big mystery behind that.”