The New York Times

By NEIL STRAUSS (NYT) 917 words
Published: April 18, 2002

Based on his own analysis, David John Oates believes that George W. Bush has been a powerful, consistent leader. ''He is strong and resolute,'' Mr. Oates said, speaking by telephone from his home in Australia. ''His reversals were very forceful. There was no internal wavering inside himself.''

Wait a minute. Reversals? Internal wavering? What exactly does Mr. Oates mean? To understand, let's begin with the popular factoid that flushing toilets swirl backward in Australia. One day in 1983, Mr. Oates said, he discovered that the toilets can also make technology work backward, when he accidentally dropped his cassette player into one.

On removing it and checking to see if it still worked, he said, he was surprised to find his Michael Jackson cassette playing in reverse. As he listened to it, he heard Mr. Jackson singing what sounded like actual words even though the song was running in reverse. This was not intentional backward-masking (like might be used by a heavy metal group surreptitiously advocating devil worship) but accidental hidden messages that came perhaps from the subconscious of the singer.

Intrigued, Mr. Oates began to discover all sorts of messages encoded backward in songs and speech: clear phrases and sentences often created by a person's hems and haws.

''Reversals are primarily formed by the inconsistencies in speech: the stammers, the stutters and the rapid alterations,'' he said. ''It's not primarily the words, but the sounds of the speech. Two people might say the same sentence, but you'll get completely different reversals.''

Mr. Oates grew to believe that these speech reversals contained subconscious messages, and since then he has advocated their use in therapy and investigation (where they serve as a sort of lie detector test). Reverse speech, as he calls it, can also provide covert peeks into the minds of pop stars, if one believes in this homemade science.

In ''Thinking of You'' by Lenny Kravitz, Mr. Oates and his students discovered the backward message ''Still missing mom; we'll be missing you.'' Jewel, in ''Deep Water,'' says, cryptically, ''You're glamorous, and you live with a Nazi.''

These and examples from Queen, Ozzy Osbourne, Bonnie Raitt, the Beatles and more can be heard forward and in reverse on Mr. Oates's Web site, reversespeech.com, which contains thousands of examples.

In one of Mr. Oates's most infamous reversals, he claims to have found the words Desert Storm in a speech by the elder George Bush before the announcement of the military operation. Some of the examples on his Web site sound like clear phrases, while others are more of a stretch to interpret as coherent statements.

So when the current President Bush talked of the war on terrorism after Sept. 11, his reversals, according to Mr. Oates, contained phrases like ''I am avowed, we will get them'' and ''Skies, we have seen the limit with terror.'' At the same time, Mr. Oates found a more ominous note in the president's speeches. His phrase ''an act of war against our country,'' when played backward, revealed the phrase ''Rule the planet.'' Meanwhile, in a speech by Osama bin Laden, one of Mr. Oates's students discovered the reversal, ''Our government is wrong; terror now.''

James Underdown, the executive director of the Center for Inquiry-West, which promotes scientific and critical thinking, said that he had seen no hard evidence supporting Mr. Oates's claims. He compared reverse speech to a Rorschach test: different people will imagine different words. ''It's looking at a pattern that's already out there, and assigning meaning and intent to something where there was none originally,'' he said.

For nearly 20 years, Mr. Oates has been promoting reverse speech as built-in radio transmissions from the subconscious mind. He said that because the unconscious mind develops before the conscious mind, children often start speaking intelligible words in reverse before they do in regular speech. In his practice, his clients range from couples seeking therapy to defendants fighting off litigation to companies seeking insights on potential employees.

In the 1990's Mr. Oates lived briefly in San Diego, where he appeared on Art Bell's radio show and reverse-speech was lumped in among paranormal phenomena. After a falling out with Mr. Bell, subsequent anonymous death threats and the destruction of his home in what Mr. Oates believes was arson, he moved his reverse-speech empire back to Australia.

Of course, if Mr. Oates can dish it out, he must be prepared to take it. After the interview, I played the tape backward to discover what was really on the reverse-speech pioneer's mind.

When discussing how his Desert Storm research went public, he admonishes himself in reverse, saying, ''You must behave, you must.'' At one point, he seems to doubt himself: discussing his hopes for becoming more commercially active soon, he says, ''Observe humorous me telling you this.'' And, most revealing, after being asked a question, he displays his intimidation at the hands of such a masterful interviewer. ''Unhand me,'' his reversal says. ''Neil scares.''