John Vokey and Don Read wanted to find out exactly what people could do with backwards
messages, so they did an experiment. They recorded a bunch of voices from different
genders, so male and female. They recorded a bunch of voices of people from different
countries, so different languages, so French, German, and English. They recorded people
asking questions, and they also recorded people just saying declarations.
The question was: what can people do with these messages when they’re played backwards?
So what exactly does a backwards message sound like, and what can people pick up?
They found there are a couple of things that people could do with backwards messages and
a couple of things that they couldn’t do.
The things that they could do with backwards messages was tell the difference between gender,
whether it was a male or a female speaker talking. They could also tell the difference
between different languages, so whether somebody was speaking German or English. They could
also—so when there were two males speaking backwards, they could tell the difference
between speaker A and speaker B.
There were also a couple of things that they couldn’t do well. So you might be able to
think—you may think that participants could tell the difference between a question and
a declaration because a question sort of ends with an inflection, but they couldn’t do
that. They also couldn’t tell the difference between a sentence that was with words in
the correct order and a sentence where it was completely scrambled.
But the most important thing they were trying to tap into with this experiment was unconscious
processing. Is there anything that people are able to pick up without their awareness?
So they asked people to categorize these backwards sentences as either Christian or Satanic or
even pornographic, and they found that people could not correctly classify these things.
One of the sentences played forwards was: “Jesus loves me. This I know,” and people
couldn’t correctly classify it as pornographic or Christian.
So what happened with the Judas Priest trial?
Well, I told you it was an awesome story. Now you’ve seen how John Vokey looks, you
should see how it played out in court.