|
A BRIEF HISTORY OF REVERSE SPEECH™ In Australia, way back in 1983, David Oates accidentally dropped a tape player into a toilet, and whilst repairing it had inadvertently wired it up incorrectly in-as-much as it would only play backwards. Six months later, whilst he was in charge of a halfway house for teenagers, he heard the rumours of backward messages on rock and roll records. He rescued his broken tape player and played Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven backwards. Right at the end of the tape he found his first ever reversal. Click on reversal to listen. Backwards it says "Plaaaay backward, hear words sung." Little did he know that this was to be the beginning of an enterprise that would span over three decades; and indeed, continue to this day. Over the next few months he investigated the rumours further by playing his whole music collection backwards. He found that there were very clear forward phrases in them all. Now he was totally hooked and wanted to know more, so he turned his attention to speech, and began playing media files backwards. His first ever speech reversal came from Neil Armstrong’s famously documented words of man’s first ever moon landing. Click on reversal to listen. Backwards it says "Man will space walk." His curiosity now led him to local libraries and bookshops, but this produced no useful information, and three years later the curiosity turned into full time research. It was at this time (January 1987) that an old friend and colleague, Greg Albrecht, joined him in the quest of looking for the answers to two questions in particular:- 1. What were these backward messages ? 2. How did they get there? Together they found that backward messages could be traced back as far as recordings made by the BBC in 1924..........................long before The Beatles time. These backward messages were usually complementary to the forward speech, and were heard at 20 - 30 second intervals within that speech. Oates and Albrecht put these facts, and also the theory of reverse speech and speech complementarity into a book entitled …… “Beyond Backward Masking: Reverse Speech and The Voice of the Inner Mind”. This book was self published and released in November 1987, more or less at the same time as a reversal had been found on the then Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawk. Click on reversal to listen. Backwards it says "Used to smoke the best marijuana." The media covered the release of the book and within six months it had become a topic which provoked avid public debate, probably due to the Bob Hawk reversal. David Oates found himself with a new career of trying to understand and verify the existence of Reverse Speech™ whilst also talking endlessly to other professionals, about it. The news about Reverse Speech™ soon crossed the Pacific Ocean to the U.S.A., and in October 1989 David moved to Dallas, Texas and began to establish it there. Word travelled fast and by 1990 a leaked memo about it to U.S. Defence Secretary Dick Cheney brought it to the attention of the world, via CNN News. Having been asked not to talk to the media about the subject, he kept his head down for the next few years; but during this time he was training students in the art, whilst continuing his research. By now he had discovered that Reverse Speech™ could be used within a therapeutic setting; the subconscious mind giving messages in the reversals of forward speech. Click on reversal to listen. Backwards it says "Need more sunlight." These could then be used for healing purposes and to change long standing behavioural patterns. Sometimes these messages would be metaphoric, so a whole new world of research opened up. By 1995 he had developed this area of Reverse Speech™ to such a degree that he moved to San Diego and set up a very active therapy practice there. He had also become a very popular guest on TV and radio shows. This type of exposure assured that the practice boomed, but it also had a nasty side effect. In 1997, he was in his office with a client as a suspicious fire began, so his secretary alerting him to it was actually captured on tape. Click on reversal to listen. Backwards it says almost exactly the same words as the forwards: "The house is on fire. Our house is on fire." This fire destroyed the practice premises, and for the following two years, despite vast security being in place, break-ins and computer hacking were prolific. In 1999, he returned home to his native Australia where he established another therapy practice. His research continues to this day, as does his training of many students year on year. More information and examples can be found on his website:
Reverse SpeechTM is a trademark owned by
David John Oates |
