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REVERSE SPEECH

Posted by Jon King on Dec 05, 2008

Tagged with: mystery, paul is dead, psychic, reverse speech, the beatles, unexplained

Known as the ‘seventh sense’, Reverse Speech is the phenomenon of detecting hidden backwards messages in speech.

In short, if human speech is recorded and played backwards, it often reveals phrases or sentences that appear to bear meaningful relationship to the forward speech.

For example, when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, he was heard to say, ‘That’s one small step for man…’, which, when reversed, appears to say: ‘Man will spacewalk.’

Another example of reverse speech is found in reversing a segment of speech from a live commentary on JFK’s assassination, taken at the precise moment the president is shot.

It appears to say: ‘He’s shot bad. Hold it. Try and look up.’

What we are hearing in these and other speech reversals, theorists suggest, is the voice of the unconscious mind: what we say forwards is what our conscious mind is thinking and processing, while our unconscious mind expresses a similar sentiment in reverse speech.

This process has even been used, successfully, in high-level business negotiations as a means of providing extra, hidden information, and in crime investigations where in one case the results were verified by DNA testing.

Evidently the whole idea of reverse speech started in the 60s, when someone inadvertently played The Beatles’ I am The Walrus backwards and found that the lyrics seemed to say:

‘Ha! Ha! Paul is dead. Ha! Ha! Paul is dead.’

Mind you, that was in the days when acid was acid!

In any event, we’d be very interested to hear any backwards clips you may find in your own music collection, especially if you can find the one where Simon Cowell is heard to proclaim:

‘Ha! Ha! The X-Factor is dead. Ha! Ha! The X-Factor is dead…’

...And then is heard to confess: ‘Actually it’s a pile of corporately-contrived mind-anaesthetizing bullshit designed specifically to suppress freedom and originality in popular art, music and culture!’

Now that would be worth listening to backwards and forwards…

image (Neil Armstrong): NASA (Paul McCartney): Turn Me On Dead Man