Monday, June 19, 1989
BACK TALK FROM THE OUTBACK
Researcher finds subconscious ideas in Reverse Speech.
By Ann Zimmerman of the Times Herald Staff
Talking to David Oates is a little creepy. Because if what he says is true, then by reversing your speech, he can discover your innermost thoughts, your deepest feelings, the unadulterated truths the subconscious mind tries to keep buried.
But don’t go reversing the above sentence to try and find out what I really think about David Oates, a former Australian insurance executive and youth worker who has been investigating reverse speech for the past five years.
It doesn’t work like that. According to Oates, who gave his first United States seminar on reverse speech this weekend in Dallas, reverse phrases are automatically produced by the subconscious about once every 20 seconds and are made up of the phonetic structure, cadences, pauses, syntax and emotion contained within forward speech. In fact, same sentences uttered by two different people would not contain the same messages when played in reverse.
As the 34-year-old Aussie is quick to point out, people have claimed to hear backward messages in rock ‘n’ roll music for years. Called backward masking, Oates says that many of those messages are not actually speech reversals, but messages that were recorded separately, then intentionally placed on the record to be heard backward. But his theory, he says, may explain why people have picked up phrases even in those songs where messages weren’t specially inserted.
Oates is either this year’s super snake-oil salesman or he is really on to something. And if you are skeptical, he understands. So was he, at first. Allegedly the only person in the world researching and using reverse speech, Oates began his research when a troubled youth he was counseling asked him what he thought about the backward messages in rock ‘n’ roll music.
An electronics buff, Oates looked into it, using a broken tape recorder that only played backward. He was intrigued by the messages he thought he heard. For the next four years, it became an obsession.
“My initial concern was that it was all in my imagination, like the pictures you see in inkblots,” he says. “I was wondering whether I was going insane or whether this was truly a unique discovery. It took me two years to be convinced that it was real. I found that the reversals occur regularly and that they were always related to forward speech, either adding to it or contradicting it. After recording different people, I found that their reverses revealed what people were actually thinking and feeling. How can that be a coincidence? I picked up names of family members and friends, things they had done in the past. Things I couldn’t have known otherwise.”
The 40 people who gathered at a free introductory seminar Friday night at the Alphabiotic New Life Center in North Dallas were initially skeptical, too. But as Oates played some famous speeches forward and backward, you could hear audible gasps of recognition in the audience. And more than half of them signed up for the $200 two-day seminar conducted over the weekend.
The clearest example was in the words that Neil Armstrong spoke when he landed on the moon — “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” When played backward, Armstrong was heard to say in a eerie, sing-song voice, characteristic of reverse speech, “Man will space walk.”
Bill Entzminger, a marriage and family therapist who teaches at Texas Woman’s University, attended the seminar Friday night. “It’s interesting,” he says of his introduction to reverse speech. “Interesting enough that I am going to get my reel-to-reel and start doing it.”
Asked if he could hear all of the reverse phrases Oates played for the audience, Entzminger says, ”I heard most of them. Most sound like they could be authentic. I see this as an excellent tool to bring out clear understanding between two people. And in therapy, where there is a lot of denial, this could help to discover the truth.”
Something like a verbal lie detector, reverse speech, says Oates, also could be an important tool in police work. In fact, Oates says he used reverse speech to help the police arrest a prominent Australian figure charged with killing his wife’s lover. By reversing a taped interview the suspect gave an Australian investigative journalist on TV, Oates says the man gave a motive for the murder and information leading to the whereabouts of the weapon.
The actual detective Oates worked with could not be reached for comment. But according to Howard Gumley, another detective with the Sydney police, Oates did speak with the police and “give his version of what he thinks the person is saying. But I am not sure anything has been substantiated. We can’t say he solved the case.”
As for what Gumley personally thinks about reverse speech techniques, he says, “I’m a skeptical sort of person. Someone will have to prove it to me.”
Oates also independently used his technique to check out the veracity of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman who was charged with murdering her baby in the Australian outback. The case was the subject of the movie “A Cry in the Dark” with Meryl Streep. Oates researched the investigation tapes made of Chamberlain after her baby disappeared. In the investigation, she stated that she saw a dingo run off with the baby. Oates found that in reverse her message supported her innocence. According to Oates, she said, “I was running . . . needed my boots … I needed the wind.” Without lots of experience, it is difficult to hear reverse speech while someone is speaking. But Oates believes we probably do pick up on some reverses phrases subconsciously, which may explain some aspects of intuitive feelings we get about a person, he says.
lt Is so logical that [reverse speech] should be there,” says Oates. “Unconsciously we have a need to communicate. The way it works is that the subconscious mind creates a picture as you talk and reverse speech is the audible expression of this unconscious picture.”
Oates is hoping that reverse speech will eventually be used as a therapeutic shortcut into the unconscious mind. But he acknowledges that there is also potential for abuse, for reverse speech could be used surreptitiously to invade a person’s most personal privacy.
To counter inappropriate usage, Oates says his techniques are copyrighted and there is a patent pending for the techniques and assorted apparatus he has created. He says he plans to shut down any reverse speech practitioner who is not operating ethically.
He adds that it is difficult to do without training, because people would miss 80 percent of the reverse phrases. Many of the phrases, he says, are metaphors that are similar to the archetypes found in Jungian psychology. And it is equally difficult to do without special recording equipment, which not only reverses tape, but also slows it down. Reverse phrases occur about 20 per cent faster than normal speech.
Of course, there is also potential for mischief. Oates claims one of his students–he teaches at a holistic health center in Brisbane, Australia–taped his university lecturer, who was giving summation of material that was going to appear on the final exam. The student says by playing the tape backward, he got every exam question in advance.
And if reverse speech is real, think of the fun journalists will have the next time a politician says, “Read my lips.”