The human brain, with all of its capabilities and control, has difficulty with one thing: time. It can only understand it when it goes in one single direction. To us it's forward; to other particles in the universe it's sideways, or tangential, or even crooked. When we are presented with something where time has been changed more than just slightly - reversed, for example - it seems nothing but completely foreign and incomprehensible. Only in the past 50 years has man even been able to hear sounds in reverse. These new sounds are not based in our reality, and to the uninitiated, they can be quite scary. It's no wonder reversed speech has been linked with Satan and other devilish conduct - that's how most cultures deal with things they can't comprehend.

A 'backwards message' is also commonly known as 'backmasking'; when a song by your favorite heavy metal band is playing, it is also theoretically sending you subliminal messages that can be revealed when the music is played in reverse. Lyrics can now be reinterpreted to have sinister meanings both forwards AND backwards! Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" was revealed to have the phrase "It's fun to smoke marijuana" buried inside; other music was found to have similar messages. When the PMRC and other such groups heard of this, the accusations ran rampant and the lawsuits began to fly.

Technically, there are three kinds of 'backwards messages': engineered, phonetic, and engineered phonetic. An engineered reversed message is one that is actually recorded normally and then reversed on the final product, just for the effect. It's sometimes that "unknown speaking" in the middle of a song, much like Pink Flood's "Empty Spaces" secret message. Phonetic reversal is the gibberish we hear when we listen to a record backwards. A phoneme is a unit of sound in the spoken word, and when they are reversed, they can result in a whole new random array of sounds, which can occasionally resemble something in our language. Engineered phonetic reversal is recording a set of phonemes with full knowledge of what they will sound like when reversed so you can still understand the phrase, but it has the strange characteristics that come along with reversed phonemes. The best example of this is from Twin Peaks, where the dwarf speaks and acts strangely in those now-famous red curtain scenes. There are many examples and analyses of these messages on a separate web page.

Nobody really knows how it started, but it took someone with quite an imagination to start spinning their LPs in reverse (with their finger) and start listening for catchwords and phrases. But once the first messages were found, it caught on for a while during the 70's, and it became a sort of fad. Once the "satanic messages" were loosely linked with tragedies, the scapegoat apparently became obvious: in a court case in 1990, Judas Priest was sued for allegedly influencing two young men to commit suicide via subliminal reversed messages on their record. Ignorant of the other problems that plagued these boys, it's even more ignorant to assume that Judas Priest COULD have subliminally forced someone to do ANYTHING with a backwards message, even if they tried. Actually engineering or planning a phonetic reversal is next to impossible, and even more difficult when trying to design it with words that fit into a song. It's like making your own palindrome, but based on sound. The second big question would have been "why?", but that was apparently up for the courts to decide. Judas Priest was eventually found not guilty, but not at the expense of their European tour and the 9-month delay of their album.

There are some people, such as John David Oates (www.reversespeech.com), who firmly believe that we communicate in reverse as well as forward when we speak. There are "overt" and "covert" means of communication that the human brain is processing simultaneously, and they reveal themselves when we listen to speech in reverse. In fact, Oates claims that babies learn to speak in reverse before they learn to speak forward! He's uncovered the "real meanings" behind speeches made by politicians, entertainers, and other famous people; it's interesting to note that they are almost always what popular opinion would want to find.