The power of suggestibility is all it took to send a wave of devotees to listen closely to BBT tapes in the quest to find suspicious whispers that could be used to support the charade that Srila Prabhupada was poisoned. These sleuths apparently felt those who allegedly did this terrible deed were foolish enough to be narrating things like: “the poison is going down” for the tape recorder to preserve everything they said!
To get this ruse going the authors of the poison rumor told everyone what they wanted you to hear. That way when you played the appropriate tape, you can feel part of the ruse when you “discover” the words you were told to listen for.
The word for an audio illusion of this type is “mondegreen”. When we cannot understand something clearly we try to make sense of it with what we do know. A humorous example of this is how children attempt to understand the advanced concepts of the Lord’s prayer with their child’s mind. It has been discovered that they here some of the lines in that sacred prayer as follows :
The mondegreens children hear in the Lords Prayer
“Our Father who aren’t in heaven… Harold be thy name. (Perhaps the most famous.) My kingdom come. I will be done. On Earth, as it is in Kevin. Give us this day our jelly bread. Forgive us our passes Forgive us our deaths. as we forgive those who test us. Lead us not into Penn Station. (A humorous modern example.) Deliver us from weevils. For diners the kingdom… or For mine is the kingdom…”
The authors of the P-Con leveraged the mondegreen effect to trick the gullible into believing the GBC engaged in something terrible. They did that extracting barely audible sounds from the last few tapes retained by the BBT and planting the suggested clause they want the listener to here into the heads.
This audio experiment below proves how helpful it is to know what you are to be listening for. Without that suggestion, there would never be any concurrence on what was allegedly said!