Nexus - 0406 - New Times Magazine-pages

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REVERSE SPEECH The Voice of the Inner Self REVERSE SPEECH The of the Self Voice Inner Recorded songs and speech played backwards reveal intelligent words, phrases and messages of a precision and design that can't be explained away by random generation. he whole thing really began as an accident. It was October 1983 and I was living in Los Angeles at the time. It was a week before my 28th birthday and I was in the bathroom preparing to go out for the evening. I had a portable Walkman attached to my belt and I was listening to music at full volume. Suddenly I tripped and my Walkman fell straight into the toilet bowl. Somewhat upset, I retrieved my waterlogged Walkman and tried to repair it. However, my electronic skills were not as good as I thought and somehow I managed to wire up the unit so that it only played backwards. Attempts to return it to normal failed and I was left with a somewhat useless portable tape player. I returned to my home country of Australia a few weeks later after hitch-hiking through Europe for a short time. I had thrown away all my belongings in London to lighten my load, but for some strange reason I took my backwards-playing Walkman with me. (I also carried a sleeping bag, a thick brown sheepskin jacket and Ugh boots, which kept me warm as I slept in the snow.) After many adventures, the reversed Walkman ended up back in Australia in my junk drawer, gathering dust. A few months later, in April 1984, I was the director of a halfway house for teenagers in Berri, a small South Australian country town. This town was the central hub of the Riverland, a major wine manufacturing region, and was totally surrounded by grape vines. The halfway house, "The Abode", was situated on the banks of a large river, the River Murray, that flowed through the centre of the town. While running this halfway house I heard about rumours, perpetrated by American evangelists, that rock and roll was "the devil's music". It was said that if certain records were played backwards, subliminally suggestive and occult messages could be heard. My mind immediately raced back to my teenage years and I remembered that some of the Beatles' records were supposed to contain backwards messages. These messages reportedly gave clues hinting that Paul McCartney had died. There seemed to be nothing too sinister in that; just a marketing exercise. However, the evangelists' claims went further, stating that many of these backwards messages had not been placed on the record intentionally, but rather seemed to ‘appear out of nowhere’, mixed in the gibberish. Some of them even claimed that they had been placed on the record by the forces of Satan himself, with the sole intent of brainwashing the youth of the world. Eventually I had on my hands several frightened teenagers who believed they had heard demons speaking to them backwards on rock-and-roll records. I was somewhat intrigued but more angry at this ridiculous rubbish scaring the teenagers in my charge. Then I remembered my broken Walkman that only played backwards and I decided to investigate these claims with the sole purpose of debunking them so I could calm down the teenagers. So I retrieved my Walkman from the junk drawer and began my project by beginning to play tape recordings of music backwards. I fully expected to hear nothing but meaning- less sounds that had probably excited someone's overactive imagination. I was wrong. As I played these tapes backwards I began to hear intelligent words and statements mixed in among the gibberish. My first thoughts were that they were merely random sounds or the product of my own overactive imagination. I checked my hearing by asking friends and associates to confirm my findings. Initially I would play them the tapes back- wards and, without prompting, ask them what they heard. In nearly all situations people could hear something, if not close to the exact words that I was hearing. by David John Oates ©1996 Reverse Speech™ Enterprises, Inc. PO Box 1037, Bonsall CA 92003, USA Telephone: (760) 732 3097 Info Line: (760) 571 3226 Fax: (760) 732 0229 E-mail: revspeech@reversespeech.com Web: http://www. reversespeech.com NEXUS - 13 A CURIOUS PHENOMENON DISCOVERED BY ACCIDENT by David John Oates ©1996 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 1997