The History of Reverse Speech
By Lee Butler
The History of Reverse Speech – It is said: ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’
Gilgamesh, Sumerian Texts and the Old Testament all reveal information of One True God, the Tower of Babel and the Great Flood.
Before the flood was sent to deluge everything on Earth and before the destruction of whatever the tower was, the whole Earth it is said was of one language and of one speech.
Adam and Eve having learnt good and evil like the Gods were forced out of the Garden of Eden to fend for themselves with Lord God placing spinning gyroscopic sword wielding angels at the gates of the East side to keep man out. Adam and Eve got busy and eventually someone became displeased of what mankind was doing with its tower and destroyed it, confounding man’s tongue with 42 languages at the same time.
Did that God confound their speech as well. Do we now have many languages and 2 speeches?
Australian national David John Oates believes so. He is our modern day discoverer of a second speech present within man and has named it ‘Reverse Speech’. Since his discovery David has tirelessly pioneered the research, documentation and development of this field and technology for us all to access this information for over 30 years.
Backward Masking and Back Masking
1983 was the year David began to discover and uncover a form of intelligible speech that is spoken backwards at the very same time that we are expressing our forwards speech.
He heard about some backward messages that could be found in playing ‘rock’ music recordings of the 1960’s and onwards in reverse.
1966 saw the record release of ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha, Ha”‘. It was produced by ‘Jerry Samuals’ under the name ‘Napoleon XIV’ and was considered a novelty record as the B side was the same A side recording to be heard entirely backwards.
This release inspired other artists to begin to incorporate backward music in their recordings too. The Beatles were famous for doing so particularly on their album ‘Revolver’. John Lennon of the Beatles created controversy when he claimed the group were more popular than Jesus Christ leading to condemnation and record burning on the streets of America. Shortly after, hidden backward messages were to be found on Beatles records as well as hidden symbolism on the record covers sparking the conspiracy that Paul McCartney had died with messages such as ‘Paul is dead man. Miss him, miss him, miss him.’ and ‘I buried Paul’. This new gimmick served well to rekindle those record sales to replace the recently burnt ones!
It wasn’t long before many more artists joined in the craze with teenagers all round the world aurally scanning their albums backwards to discover the hidden messages and compare their findings with friends.
This technique was called ‘Backward Masking’ and were the result of messages deliberately recorded backwards and inserted or ‘tracked’ onto a recording meant to be played forwards.
1967 and the ‘Summer of Love’ gave way to a pandemic of backward hidden messages. Many bands began to experiment with messages but some appeared not to have been intentionally tracked onto the recordings but derived, with no mechanical manipulation what so ever, from the vocalists singing voices themselves. The reverse fad now began to catch the attention of other ears followed by their hysterical tongues.
It wasn’t many years before the community at large became concerned. Scientists, politicians and religious groups all took interest with some claiming the messages were from the devil himself and would be a cause of harm to those that listened to them.
This scaremongering caught the attention of David Oates whilst he was running a halfway house for street kids. Were all these messages satanic in nature? Were the halfway house youths really in danger from listening to rock music played backwards? With a rewired tape player David set about finding out and soon his backward playing tape machine discoveries shifted from pure curiosity to an obsessional study for him.
Whilst listening to these studio engineered backward masking messages David discovered some other messages that were not intentionally made by the music production studio teams. These naturally occurring communications coming from the singing voices of the vocalists he termed ‘Back Masking’ to distinguish them from the backward masking messages placed by the record producers.
His first back masking message heard in this way was from a ‘Def Leopard’ track ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and the final line of the song played backwards revealed ‘Play backwards. Hear words sung’ and where you can hear more reversals earlier in the song.
A skeptical mind may inquire if these Reverse Speech communications are merely a coincidence amongst the gibberish of our forward speech played backwards. Research has shown that there are far too many reversals obtainable from our grammatically correct forward speech, coupled with the unique relevance to the subject matter of that speech to remain coincidence. Also, two people vocalizing the same thing can produce completely different reversals and it is next to impossible to consciously create them either in spontaneous speech or written and rehearsed lyrics.
Reveal to World
At the time David found it difficult to research what these messages were and where they were coming from, with very little reference to them at the local libraries and book shops. He did however discover that it was not the Beatles that introduced these backward messages as other examples could be found as far back as 1924 on a ‘British Broadcasting Corporation‘ (BBC) commercial ‘Auntie Aggie and the BBC‘ revealing the reversal ‘This is not a noose, no its really not‘.
It took David 2 years to convince himself that the speech reversals he was consistently finding in recordings of both vocalised songs and regular speech were a unique discovery and very real and not just part of his imagination, like images in the gypsy tea leaves. He could not escape the fact the reversals were consistently revealing what people were really feeling at the time of the recordings and real facts revealed, such as names of people and places, they had actual experience with were too common to be any mere coincidence.
Two years later David co-authored his first book about Reverse Speech ‘Beyond Backward Masking: Reverse Speech and The Voice of the Inner Mind‘ with fellow researcher and good friend ‘Greg Albrecht’. It was noticed backward messages were frequently complimentary to the forward messages and could be heard at least once every 30 seconds and so their findings at the time were quickly promoted to a skeptical Australian public.
Despite initial skepticism their news did catch the interest of some scientists, whose tests demonstrated their subject’s brain patterns showed detection of both deliberately placed backward masking and naturally occurring speech reversals in recordings played forwards; but most importantly the brain could differentiate between the two.
David embarked on a mission to get the word out to the world with lectures, training classes and media interviews to give us all new understandings of language and the inner recesses of the human mind.
1988 saw David move to Brisbane where he worked with therapist Dr. Caroline Meade analysing the reverse speech of her patients. He began to teach training classes in 1989 and took initial studies in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnosis to advance his growing therapeutic practice.
In 1989 David moved country to Dallas, USA where he soon caught the attention of ‘C.B. Scott Jones’ who worked for a prominent US Senator to seek out new technologies and bring them to mainstream attention. Lectures were set up in Washington DC to present Reverse Speech to the ‘Intelligence’ community.
During this period David had been analysing the speech of prominent and famous public figures and unwittingly revealed secret operational code words and military manoeuvres through the speeches of the then President ‘George Bush Jr’.
A memo from Jones to the then Secretary of Defense ‘Dick Cheney’ was leaked to the press and overnight Reverse Speech became a household name questioning whether the President was hiding secret codes in his speeches.
David was asked to stay out of the public eye and heeded this warning to focus on training classes and the therapeutic aspects of his studies.
In the same year David was requested to give testimony in a prominent court case with the rock group ‘Judas Priest‘. The ‘heavy metal’ group and record producers ‘CBS Records‘ were being sought for damages after two youths attempted to commit suicide by shooting themselves with a shot gun after hearing the ‘hypnotic’ music on the album ‘Stained Class‘. One youth died instantly and the other was severely disfigured with claims they had shot themselves after repeatedly listening to the group’s music which it was alleged contained subliminal messages including: ‘Let’s be dead‘, ‘Fuck the Lord‘ and ‘Do it‘.
Although David did not have to provide testimony in the end the ‘Judge’ made an important statement as part of his judgement. The lawsuit failed because the evidence was not convincing enough (for the Jury) to suggest that the backward phrases, which were undoubtedly recognised to be there, were caused by anything other than coincidence of sound. There was also insufficient evidence to suggest that they could be subliminally suggestive.
The 6.2 million dollar case may have had a different outcome if David had provided testimony for he was a man who knew that the coincidence of sound the judge talked of was more than just coincidence and the scientific Electroencephalograph (EEG) studies had begun to substantiate the backward phrases or speech reversals were indeed recognised and acknowledged by at least some aspects of the human brain.
1995 to 1997 saw David establishing a very active therapeutic practice, more books published and becoming a popular guest on American radio and TV. A mysterious fire destroyed the Reverse Speech premises early 1997 which prompted extensive security measures but they did not stop the numerous break-ins and computer hacking over the following couple of years. David established his own worldwide syndicated radio show but got embroiled in a nasty lawsuit involving a rival radio show host. Death threats and hate mail led David to settle out of court and return to Australia.
Despite America losing David his discoveries and legacy continued particularly in Oregon where practitioner ‘Jack Johnston’ assisted police and law officials in solving crimes using information gained through reverse speech and then verified by the authority’s acting on the information. Through Jack’s work Reverse Speech is now an accepted course in a major Oregon University and the course accepted by the Oregon State Police as credits towards their cadet’s training.
David still lives in Australia where he continues to enjoy his therapeutic practice, continued promotion of reverse speech through his new books and radio and TV appearances as well as training students from all over the world, many of whom go on to be successful practitioners themselves.
Some of these practitioners are now beginning to write their own books as well as setting up further training platforms around the world.
Back to the Future
There are already many applications for reverse speech. Areas already covered include personal development, rehabilitation and therapy, family therapy, business partnership analysis, corporate business decisions, suitable employee applicant decisions, investigatory work both private and assisting the ‘Authorities’ as well as assistance in remote viewing work.
On one of his websites David writes:
“As you can see the application of reverse speech is bigger than we can imagine. It gives us insights beyond what we can consciously know in virtually every situation.
Imagine asking yourself any question and getting an answer of TRUTH from your unconscious mind to shed new light on decisions or challenges that are existing or even unknown and then receiving a solution to those challenges that is virtually 100% accurate if enough information is given in dialogue.”
World renown Radio Programme host Jeff Rense quotes:
‘This is all just the tip of the iceberg with vast scope for many more applications and understanding as voices from the unconsciousness become more widely accepted, developed and utilised by mankind to re-vamp and re-structure the societies we currently live in.’
Hooray for David Oates! And let mankind steer the history of reverse speech on the path of truth to telepathy.