The examples below summarize actual advice provided to clients on operational remote-viewing projects. In each case, the information provided was based on speech reversals found in audio recordings of remote-viewing sessions. In each case, feedback from the client or news media confirmed the accuracy of the predictions.
Example #1: There’s a good chance that ‘Rose’ or ‘Rosetta’ is the name of your birth mother. And you may want to keep an open mind about your biological father – he may not have been the monster you’ve been told he was.
Example #2: The crime scene – a spent shell casing, a trail of blood, a missing husband – appears to be related to domestic troubles and possibly an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl. The police should be looking for someone named ‘Johan.’ Russians may be involved.
Example #3: Viewer A seems to have good site contact, and his description of the target location should be given careful consideration. The description from Viewer B – who normally has a good track record on this sort of target – appears to be off in this case, and should probably be given less weight.
What is Reverse Speech?
Human communication consists of far more than the syllables the speaker chooses to utter in the forward direction. We all know that two people can say the exact same words to vastly different effect on a listener, depending on factors usually outside of the speaker’s conscious awareness such as facial expressions, body language, pheromones and probably other energetic factors not yet fully understood. Reverse speech – which, as its name suggests, is simply language that occurs backwards in speech – is yet another channel by which the subconscious mind can communicate.
Reverse speech occurs involuntarily and simultaneously with forward speech. It is determined not only by the choice and order of words spoken in the forward direction, but also by tone, pace, pauses, and non-word sounds such as laughter, sighs, inhalations and stammers. Reverse speech is automatically generated by the subconscious mind of the speaker and is received and decoded by the subconscious mind of the listener.
Because reverse speech is composed of non-word sounds as well as word sounds, it is difficult if not impossible to extract speech reversals from a written transcript of forward speech. In other words, just taking a forward-speech transcript and reading its letters backwards usually will not reveal speech reversals. However, reverse speech can easily be heard at the conscious level when forward speech is recorded and played backwards out loud.
For an example of how reverse speech works, take President Barack Obama’s September 10, 2013 speech regarding a possible American military response to a chemical attack reported in Syria. In this speech, “a crime against humanity” reverses as “get an ambush, snag America.” The section of the speech where this arises is:
…the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off limits, a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war…
Playing this same segment in the reverse direction, one hears some gibberish followed by some intelligible words followed by more gibberish:
gibberishgibberishget an ambush, snag Americagibberishgibberish
In reverse-speech work, the conventional annotation for this forward-reverse pair would be as follows, with the precise portion of the forward segment that produced the reversal being placed in brackets:
F: the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off limits, [a crime against humanity], and a violation of the laws of war
R: Get an ambush snag America
The study of reverse speech has been pioneered over the past thirty years by David John Oates. Reverse speech appears to be a universal human characteristic, and Oates’s research has revealed that the frequency of reversals tends to range from one every 10-20 seconds in casual conversation with good rapport, to one every 2-10 minutes in public speeches with prepared text.
Reverse speech almost always relates to the topic of the forward speech occurring at or near the same spot where the reversal arises. The two modes of speech, forward and backward, combine to communicate a more complete picture of the total psyche of the speaker – a principle Oates refers to as the Theory of Reverse Speech Complementarity. In other words, speech reversals are not random. If someone is talking about a murder in forward speech, there is a very high probability that the speech reversals at that spot will relate to the murder as well, and not to what the speaker saw on television the night before or what’s on his to-do list for the weekend. Reverse speech can confirm or contradict the corresponding forward speech – depending on whether the speaker is telling the truth or lying – and can also expand on the topic of forward speech, providing additional information.
Reversals may be expressed in regular language styles, metaphors or archetypes. Taking another example from President Obama’s recent Syria speech, the following reversal uses regular language and its meaning appears fairly straightforward:
F: I’ve ordered our military to maintain their current posture to keep the pressure on Assad and to be in a position to respond if diplomac[y fails]
R: Slay a few
From the same speech, the following reversal containing the word “sheriff” may be a metaphoric reference to America’s oft-cited role as the world’s policeman:
F: over the last two years [my administrati]on has tried diplomacy and sanctions, warnings and negotiations
R: Sheriff sit em down
Again from the same speech, “Caesar” is an example of archetypal language, and may reveal the President’s underlying belief in the so-called imperial presidency and perhaps also feelings of figuratively being knifed by certain factions within the legislature:
F: [I believe our democracy is s]tronger when the President acts with the support of Congress
R: Caesar calm but reveal death
How is Reverse Speech Used in Conjunction with Remote Viewing?
As is the case with remote viewing, reverse speech is premised on the idea that the subconscious mind has access to far more information than most people are usually consciously aware of. Not surprisingly, when a remote viewer taps into this vast reserve of information during a viewing session, the speech reversals of the viewer tend to be frequent and relevant to the topic at hand.
A one-hour remote-viewing session can easily generate one hundred speech reversals or more. Many of these reversals will be too fragmentary or cryptic to be useful. But some of the reversals will provide substantive details about the target. And other reversals – often in the nature of viewer self-talk – can assist an analyst by providing clues as to whether the viewer’s forward-speech descriptions are accurate.
Examples of Substantive Information Found in Speech Reversals from Remote-Viewing Sessions
This first set of examples is from a project where I acted as project manager, remote-viewing analyst and reverse-speech analyst, together with the assistance of a second trained reverse-speech analyst. “Alex” (not his real name), a man in his mid-50s who had been given up for adoption as an infant, was seeking help from our remote-viewing team in learning about his birth mother’s life and, if possible, in locating her. The adoption agency that had placed Alex would not disclose the identity or location of his birth mother, but it had provided Alex with a heritage report giving some background about the circumstances of his conception and birth. From the heritage report, Alex learned that his birth mother had been a young, unmarried, Italian-Catholic with little in the way of education or job skills when she had immigrated to the United States a few years after WWII. According to the report, Alex was conceived when this young woman was raped in the cab of a truck by a stranger who had offered her a ride. Allegedly after attacking her, this man had put her out on the side of the road in the pouring rain and driven off into the night, never to be heard from again.
The viewing team, consisting of six individuals trained in Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV), produced many good sessions with details concerning the whereabouts, physical condition, personality and life events of Alex’s birth mother. While the team’s CRV findings are impressive and would perhaps make for an interesting article in their own right, for purposes of this article I will focus on a selection of the project’s reverse-speech findings.
In an audio recording of one of the viewer’s sessions targeted on Alex’s birth mother, the following reversals were found, and this information was provided to Alex as a possible lead:
F: [zero one] (The forward speech in this example was from the coordinates for the target person)
R: A rose
F: [what is her] name
R: Rosetto
Many months after this information was provided to Alex, when he and his birth mother were finally reunited, Alex learned that his birth mother’s name is in fact “Rosetta” and that she goes by “Rose.” It is worth noting that the two forward-reverse pairs above demonstrate the Theory of Reverse Speech Complementarity. In both cases, the forward speech refers to the identity of the target person – either by coordinate number or inquiry about the name – and the reversal correspondingly provides information about the identity of the target person.
In another session on Alex’s project, a viewer described an important life event of the target person involving an upsetting discussion with another party. The subject of the disagreement had to do with a conceptual product, and with the trade-offs between simplification of life in the short-term and loss of control over the long-term. In analyzing this viewer’s session, I suspected that the “conceptual product” was the pregnancy (the subconscious mind loves puns), and that the discussion was an argument between Alex’s birth mother and the biological father about how to handle this unexpected event – get married, have an abortion, etc. Certainly not the sort of conversation one would have with a stranger-rapist. The following speech reversals from this portion of the viewer’s session seemed to confirm this interpretation:
F: new concept, wants to fly with it [but you have reservation]s, don’t you
R: He hasn’t got married no
F: what is this product, [what is idea, what is the con]ception trying to do for their customer
R: Just cut away the accidental
Reinforcing this interpretation were two reversals from a different viewer on the same project, where the forward speech of the viewer related to an important period in the target person’s young adulthood:
F: [ya know, kinda ]teased up in the back and very blonde
R: Been horny
F: she’s certainly not dressed and [her hairstyle is not] as though it were current so I think I’m not looking at a current…
R: Aunts gonna lecture her
Although consciously unknown to the viewer at the time of doing the session that produced these reversals, the target person had been living with an elderly aunt and uncle when she became pregnant with Alex. The reversal “aunt’s gonna lecture her” was taken as a possible indication that Rose may have had some responsibility for the situation that led to the pregnancy.
During their first meeting upon being reunited, Rose told Alex that his birth father had in fact been someone known to her. She confessed that the story in the heritage report about being raped in a truck by a stranger on a rainy night had been a complete fabrication.
All this is not to say that the biological father did not have some culpability. Regarding the events at this time in Rose’s life, a viewer produced this reversal:
F: …what hap[pened, but she] had left home…
R: He shouldn’t have
During their reunion, although Rose revealed to Alex that his father was not a stranger-rapist, she still insisted that the situation resulting in the pregnancy was one where “he shouldn’t have.” According to Alex, this was a phrase Rose repeated many times verbatim, just as it is heard in the viewer’s reversal.
On another remote-viewing project where I served as the reverse-speech analyst, a woman from a prominent European family had come home to find her husband missing, with a trail of blood and a spent shell casing in the entryway of their home. Based on speech reversals found in the audio recording of a remote viewer’s session on the project, significant information about the motive and identity of the perpetrators was provided within hours of the disappearance, and more than two weeks before the missing man’s body was discovered.
Reversals containing “best man,” “father,” “the niece,” “house,” and “marry” hinted at a domestic situation of some kind. Multiple instances of the reversal “Johan to knock” suggested that someone by the name of Johan was key to the apparently violent events of the case. The reversals “beet eater” and “borscht” indicated a possible involvement of Russians. The audio in this case also contained this striking reversal:
F: [and this is an unknown ideog]ram
R: Bein into a nun is a sin
“Bein’ into” was interpreted in its slang sense of being attracted to, and “nun” was considered for its metaphoric implications. At its most basic level, what does a nun symbolize? Religion? Perhaps, although that didn’t seem quite right in this case. A woman who is off limits? That seemed more likely. Had the missing man been having an affair? One would not normally refer to the “other woman” in an affair as a “nun.” What sort of off-limits female would have the purity connoted by the word “nun”? An underage girl.
Feedback in this case was plentiful, and media accounts of the recovery of the victim’s body and the ensuing criminal proceedings revealed a family deeply divided. Acrimony had been simmering for some time between the victim and his in-laws over matters of marriage, assets and child custody, including earlier accusations that the victim was engaged in incest with his youngest female child. The victim’s father-in-law – Johan – admitted to having arranged for some thugs to rough up the victim. (“Johan” has been substituted in this article for the father-in-law’s real name as well as the corresponding speech reversals. The actual name heard in the speech reversals matched the real name of the father-in-law.) Although the criminal investigation is ongoing at the time of this article and final convictions of all the perpetrators have yet to be obtained, among the suspects detained and questioned for the crime are a group of men described in press accounts as being of Russian or Chechen origin.
Reverse Speech – An Analyst’s Best Friend
Most of us who have been trained by former members of the U.S. military’s remote-viewing unit have heard stories about the art of monitoring, and how a skilled monitor can read a viewer’s physical micro-movements during a session and almost magically separate good data from bad. But the reality in the civilian world is that many viewers work without monitors, squeezing in a session after tucking children in to bed at night or getting up early to do some viewing before heading off to a day at the office. The project manager (PM) – who often also wears the hat of the analyst – does not always have the luxury of sitting in the same room with the viewer while the session is being written. Often the viewer and the PM/analyst are not even in the same time zone or on the same continent.
So how can reverse speech overcome this separation from the viewer and help with analysis? It turns out that the subconscious mind of a viewer will often come right out and say – in reverse speech – whether or not the viewer is accurately describing the assigned target.
Take the following example from a project in which law enforcement, at the prompting of the mother of a missing young man, had asked for a description of the condition and location of the missing individual. A viewer who had been given no information about the project other than neutrally worded frontloading to describe a “person” and a “location” generated the following speech reversal near the beginning of his session, indicating that at the subconscious level he was already aware of the nature of the target:
F: where [you want me to g]o
R: Get him home
More examples of confirming reversals from real-world projects include “now you’re gettin’ to know,” “I got it,” “say sure,” “invest in this,” “now we know,” and “I have this now.”
Just as the subconscious mind can generate speech reversals to confirm that a viewer is accurately describing the target, it can also generate speech reversals warning that the viewer’s imagination may have taken over and that the forward-speech information being reported by the viewer in that particular part of the session is not to be trusted. Examples of this sort of warning speech reversal – taken from actual operational projects where feedback later demonstrated viewer inaccuracy – include “who doubts with me,” “I loused this up,” “boy you’re confused,” “vaccinate – its silly,” and “thats false image.”
Challenges in Using Reverse Speech on Remote-Viewing Projects
When reviewing an audio recording for speech reversals, it is critical that the analyst be able to separate the gibberish from true reversals that communicate information from the subconscious mind of the speaker. To impose some discipline on the natural human tendency to find patterns, Oates has developed a system of checkpoints that examine factors including syllable count, clarity of vowel and consonant sounds, clarity and distinguishability of word beginnings and endings, spacing of words, separation from the surrounding gibberish, and tonal flow and tempo. Based on this checkpoint analysis, each reversal can be assigned a validity factor. While a low validity factor does not necessarily exclude the possibility that the reversal is genuine, it indicates a lower level of confidence and allows the analyst to weight the reversal accordingly.
Even when the above-mentioned checkpoints are applied, some caveats are in order. In many cases, an apparent reversal may be the result of speech sounds that resemble actual words simply by coincidence. Short reversals, especially single-word reversals, are more likely to be the result of coincidental sounds than are longer reversals. This is due to the fact that the odds of resembling coherent language by chance fall with increasing syllable count.
Homophones can also be vexing for the reverse-speech analyst. Consider again the reversals from President Obama’s speech that were used as illustrative examples at the beginning of this article. How might interpretation change if “sheriff sit em down” were instead “share if sit ‘em down”? Or what if “Caesar calm but reveal death” were instead “seas are calm but reveal death”?
Yet another challenge relates to the problem of analyst projection. A reverse-speech analyst may begin to form opinions or theories about a case he or she is working on, and consequently may begin to project meaning onto gibberish or to exclude genuine reversals as necessary to conform to the analyst’s developing bias. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, unlike remote viewers who typically work blind to a target, a reverse-speech analyst usually is made aware of the known details of a target before beginning work. The reason for informing the reverse-speech analyst of these details at this early stage is to increase the analyst’s ability to spot relevant reversals that might otherwise be passed over. Arming the analyst with this information may also assist in locating reversals that contain proper names of persons or places related to the target – especially where those names are unusual or foreign and might not otherwise jump out at the analyst as distinguishable from the gibberish.
Interpretation can still be an issue even when all the challenges of finding a genuine speech reversal have been overcome. For example, in the project relating to Alex’s birth mother, a reversal was found saying “Irish groom.” The forward-speech context related generally to the birth mother, and did not provide a more specific context for interpretation. Did the reversal have to do with horses, which a few viewers had made mention of during their remote-viewing sessions? Or perhaps it was a metaphoric reference to the fact that Alex had been adopted by an Irish family, who in essence stepped into the parenting role that a wedding groom would have played had Rose married the father and kept her child. The most likely interpretation is one that was not considered until it was provided by the target person herself after the conclusion of the project. According to Rose, after giving Alex up for adoption, she had gone to cosmetology school and become the hairdresser for members of President Kennedy’s family, something she was very proud of. As this example should make clear, a reverse-speech analyst simply may not have all the information necessary to correctly interpret a speech reversal, and a healthy dose of humility is in order when suggesting possible interpretations to a client.
Finally, perhaps the greatest challenge in adding a reverse-speech component to a remote-viewing project is cost, whether that is measured in terms of increased client billings on a paying project or increased hours of donated work on a pro bono project. A one-hour audio recording from a remote-viewing session can easily take five to ten hours or more to analyze and document for speech reversals. Multiplying that figure by the number of viewers on the team and the number and length of sessions submitted by each viewer will give an idea of how quickly costs can balloon when reverse speech is used.
Conclusion
Using reverse speech can enhance a remote-viewing project by providing additional substantive information about a target, including specific names. Reverse speech also can serve as a sort of monitor substitute, often providing indications of whether a viewer’s reported perceptions are on target. There are a number of challenges that need to be overcome in order to make effective use of reverse speech in the remote-viewing context – including issues of accurately identifying genuine speech reversals, avoiding the pitfalls of analyst projection, properly interpreting speech reversals that may sometimes involve metaphoric or archetypal language, and managing costs. As the examples in this article hopefully have illustrated, despite these challenges, together remote viewing and reverse speech can be a powerful combination.
For remote viewers, analysts or project managers interested in giving reverse speech a try, I would recommend visiting www.reversespeech.com. There you can find information about training courses and the Reverse Speech Pro sound editor software.
Gail Clayton Husick has been trained through the advanced level and mentored in Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) by Lyn Buchanan, a former member and trainer of the U.S. military CRV unit. She is also a Certified Reverse Speech Investigator trained by David John Oates. Additionally, she holds a certificate from the Dream Studies Program at Saybrook University. Ms. Husick provides remote-viewing and reverse-speech services through her Seattle-based consulting firm. Prior to working in the fields of remote viewing and reverse speech, Ms. Husick maintained a corporate law practice at a large firm in Silicon Valley, where she was a partner and member of the management committee. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Rice University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.