They Were Searching For Something That Didn't Exist - And They Found It!

"Here's to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He'll give you 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer. Sad Satan" - Stairway To Heaven, Led Zeppelin (if you play it backwards - and if someone tells you that's what it's saying).

You may remember the outrage about backmasking and subliminal messaging in rock, and some pop, music from the early nineties. Judas Priest, as well as Led Zeppelin (whose reverse paean to sad Satan and his tool shed I wrote about back in April 2018), were at the sharp end when their song 'Better by You, Better than Me" (a Spooky Tooth cover) was accused of having a hidden, backwards, message suggesting that listeners "do it, do it".

What 'it' was remains open to multiple interpretations but, according to the families of 18 year old Raymond Belknap and 20 year old James Vance in Nevada, "it" was suicide - which both the young men attempted, Belknap successfully. Vance disfigured himself and died three years later of a suspected drug overdose.

Judas Priest singer Rob Halford pointed out, correctly, at the time that if he was to hide subliminal messages in his songs he'd hide ones imploring his fans to buy more Judas Priest records and not to kill themselves. Not least as that would be a terrible business model for a band. I wondered at the time who it was who was buying records by bands they didn't like and then playing them backwards.

It was a story we ended up chatting about last night in The Bell at Whitechapel and that's because it was a story that was touched on by Professor Chris French's Hidden Messages (that aren't really there) talk for the London Fortean Society. A fun talk it was too, lots of (optional) audience participation, and, by Chris's own admission, possibly the least academic talk he'd ever given.

Though there was a tiny bit of academia (of sorts) to begin with when Chris talked about pareidolia (the tendency to see patterns or, often, faces in random/ambiguous visual patterns), how we use both top down and bottom up processing to make sense of the very confusing world we live in and how seeing patterns in life is one of humanity's greatest strengths. The problems coming when we subconsciously overplay our hand in this field.

From thereon in, for the most part, Chris simply talked about, and showed us, examples of occasions when people have seen things that are not really there. Some were better than others. Some you can see (or hear) straight away, some you need cajoling towards, and some, quite frankly, are total and utter bollocks.

There's the immaculate confection that heads up this blog. Is it a nun or is it a bun? SPOILER ALERT - it's a cinnamon bun but it does, to me, look a bit like Mother Teresa. I think it's better than the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich that eventually sold for $28,000 and is now believed to be an exhibit in a museum in Las Vegas. The less said about the testicle that looks like a face the better. Why only one testicle you may ask. Well, would you want to share a scrotum with THAT?

Many years ago, Salvador Dali was shown an image of an African village but he was shown it sideways on and mistook it for a face by Pablo Picasso. Dali later adapted it into his own work, Paranoiac Village (c.1931). You can make you own mind up below.

There were further visual examples but Chris has got a book to sell (The Science of Weird Shit:Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal) so I won't tell ALL his stories here (not that many people will read it anyway). We soon moved on to auditory hidden messages (that aren't really there) and a section on electronic voice phenomena.

Most of these are recorded in supposedly haunted houses and the like and most of them, you guessed it, have to be played backwards to be understood. Except, you'll do very well if you can understand anything without someone first suggesting what it is you might hear. There's a range of hidden messages from "John Belushi", the positive "we keep planning for peace", the far less positive "prepare to die", and the frankly bizarre "hidden morphine" which, no matter how many times we - the audience - listened to it sounded much more like "it's working". Suggesting the words weren't uttered by a ghost at all but by the tape recorder operator. 

Although that would require them to be able to talk backwards. Which brings us to the Australian writer David Oates (based, not entirely surprisingly, in California) who has proposed a theory about reverse speech. He believes that our brains consist of a left 'hemisphere' and a right 'hemisphere'. The left hemisphere is responsible for what we say and what others hear us say. The right hemisphere however is incapable of lying and as we glibly spout untruths from our mouths, the right hemisphere of our brain makes sure that these words, if listened to backwards - of course, are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Oates believes in this horseshit to such a degree that he believes the police should listen to interviews with suspects backwards to ascertain if they're guilty or not. We got a couple of examples of reverse speech from a couple of well known American politicians. There was Hillary Clinton telling some unremarkable anecdote (if you listen to it forwards) but saying "bless the ale - this is the life" if you listen to it backwards.

Then there was Donald Trump. Puce with rage, as ever, I can't even recall what bullshit was coming out of his cat's arse of a mouth when he spoke forward but played backwards he appeared to be saying "send my bigots in". I'm not even sure they were actually playing that one backwards. What a wanker he is.

Then, of course - as outlined earlier, there was the music. Not just Led Zeppelin and sad Satan's little tool-shed or Judas Priest decimating their own fanbase but Freddie Mercury telling us "it's fun to smoke marijuana" in Queen's Another One Bites The Dust and Michael Jackson explaining quite a lot in Beat It which, if played backwards and if you let your imagination run wild, features the King of Pop revealing that "I believe it was Satan in me".

Lady Gaga is another, like Taylor Swift, who right wing Christian fundamentalists in America believe is in thrall to Beelzebub. Just listen to Paparazzi backwards and the proof is there:- "we model it on the arts of Lucifer". In fact there are few pop or rock stars who are not in league with Old Nick. Though we did wonder if you played the music of openly demonic rock bands, like Deicide and Burzum, backwards would the hidden messages be about letting God into your life and surrendering yourself to Christianity!

Probably not. Satanists aren't as weird as Christians so they don't waste time trying to prove that shit. Nearly as weird as Christians are Internet cat people and you'll not be surprised to find that there is a subset of people on the Internet who have found hidden messages when interpreting their cat's speech! One moggy insists "I'm cold" and demands a towel, another complains, or simply comments, about being alone but the star has to be the bowtied black and white cat Big Billy.

Big Billy, if you listen 'carefully', proudly announces that "I'm Big Billy" and that he has "the biggest wet willy". It was a fun note to end a fun, yet informative, talk on and after a Q&A session (that took in Pink Floyd, ELO, Mr Ed the talking horse, Handel's Messiah, QAnon, Rupert Sheldrake, fairies, UFO abduction, and the unreliability of memory) soon we all repaired downstairs to talk about crisps, police identity parades, and Wales losing out on a place in the 2024 Euros to Poland by the final penalty in a shoot out.

Thanks to Professor Chris French for a(nother) great talk, thanks to David for hosting, and thanks to Jade, Dewi, Tim, Michael, and Paula for joining me at the talk and in the pub downstairs afterwards. Next time you think you hear hidden message but suspect it wasn't really there, don't build up some conspiracy theory around it, have a bit of fun with it. It's what Big Billy, Rob Halford, and the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich would want.