In the summer of 1965, inside a multi-story
house on the coast of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Dr. John C. Lilly--neurophysiologist,
inventor, psychonaut, and self-described consciousness pioneer--prepared the setting
for his most ambitious experiment yet. The house had been partially flooded. Ramps were
installed at either end so that the tide from the Caribbean sea would continuously push new water
in while washing old water out. Margaret Howe, the only human resident of the house, who had cu
t her
hair short in anticipation of living in seawater for the next 10 weeks, bordered her makeshift bed
with a shower curtain to keep dry while she slept. Peter, a six-year-old dolphin and the house's
only other occupant, would also have an area all to himself: a deep water pool adjacent to the sea.
And every day, the two would meet in the middle, in a space flooded to Margaret's shins, where
they would attempt to accomplish the experiment's impossible objective. "Today is August 18.
This
is the morning lesson with Peter. Hello!" "The dolphin must learn how
to physically say the words," Dr. Lilly had instructed, "and he must
learn the meaning of what he is saying." Margaret's job was to teach Peter English just
like a mother would a child. She would use toys, food rewards, and whatever unconventional
methods she could devise to get through to him. Dr. Lilly, who'd agreed not to interfere,
would be floating in the darkness of his sensory deprivation tank above them, assistin
g
Margaret not physically but telepathically. Outside of the house, NASA, the united
states military, and the rest of the world waited for Margaret Howe and Dr. Lilly
to become the first in history to bridge the inter-species communication gap, an achievement
of cosmic significance. But few knew who John C. Lilly really was, or who he would be by
the end. "I'm a student of the unexpected." Margaret knew that 10 weeks alone with a
dolphin, wading through seawater, attempting to coax English
from it would be taxing. Earlier
that spring, she tested the limits of her own tolerance by completing a week-long trial run.
Margaret found the living conditions inside the partially flooded house Dr. Lilly had renovated
from his laboratory far from ideal, for either human or dolphin. "I slept usually in daytime
clothes, wet," Margaret wrote of the trial period. "In a bed that was wet, with a dry quilt that got
wet, with a dry pillow that got wet except for a corner I would protect with m
y cheek." Several
changes were recommended, including deeper water for the dolphin, a cordoned off dry area for
Margaret, a larger variety of food choices, and a vacuum to deal with the waste deposits
that would collect and float along the floor. Dr. Lilly was happy to grant these requests, along
with anything else within his power to fulfill. He had promised his financial backers that a
scientific breakthrough that only existed in fiction would take place inside this house, where
we would
transcend the differences of evolutionary adaptation and converse with another species the
way we converse with each other. Their original student was a female dolphin they named Pam. She
responded to the English lessons with impressive mimicry, but she was despondent, apprehensive
around humans, perhaps even traumatized by the whole ordeal. For the full experiment, they chose
a young enthusiastic dolphin named Peter. At only six years old, Peter was rambunctious and had
trouble focusing b
ut his brain was a sponge. And of only the few dolphins available
at Lilly's laboratory, Peter was the most promising candidate. The requisite adjustments to
the house were made, and in the following summer, the 23 year old Margaret Howe said goodbye to
her family and friends, donned her leotard, and settled into what would become notoriously
known as Dr. Lilly's dolphin house. Margaret Howe hadn't known John C. Lilly long
when they began their experiment together. He'd come to St. Thomas I
sland only a few years
prior. Although a stranger to Margaret and the other lifelong residents of the Caribbean town,
Dr. Lilly's intentions were well known: he was the man who would speak to dolphins. Having sold
much of his property to buy the real estate and calling in favors to help with the construction
of his laboratory, he'd arrived under considerable financial and reputational risk. He left the job
security of working for the National Institute of Health, whereas a neurophysiologist
, he was known
for mapping the neural regions that trigger pain, fear, and arousal and macaque monkeys. He
demonstrated that when a monkey is given a switch to stimulate an electrode that had been
placed within the pleasure center of its brain, it would press the switch three times per second,
16 hours a day. His early work with dolphins was equally brutal. While attempting to study their
brains, he'd accidentally asphyxiated several dolphins after placing them under anesthesia,
leading to
the discovery that they couldn't breathe unconsciously. But as he continued
exploring the brains of rats, cats, sheep, and any other animal he could access, he pioneered
a sleeve guide technique of guiding a hypodermic needle directly into the cortex, which did not
require removing large sections of the skull or anesthesia. Now with an adequate way to
study the dolphin brain, which was similar in size and complexity to the human brain, Lilly
began to see their potential for intelligence. H
e became interested in how they communicated with
each other. It was well known that dolphins and whales were highly social, but there was something
more; they appeared able to convey complex ideas to one another. He had found that when a
dolphin was incapable of swimming to the surface due to an injury, it could emit a distress call
to others who would then hoist it to the top so it could take a breath of air. He sought out those
with extensive experience with the creatures, such as whaler
s and sea captains, who told stories
of cetaceans coordinating to threaten to capsize their hunting ships, and communities of killer
whales within 50 miles of one another who would avoid the gaze of a harpoon as if they could
recognize it by description alone. To Lilly, these weren't just anecdotes, but evidence
for a hypothesis that these creatures had likely developed a complex language, one
perhaps even as nuanced as human language. But even more exciting were Lilly's accounts
of bottle
nose dolphins mimicking human speech, spoken not in the water but in the air,
something they rarely do in the wild. Although their pronunciation wasn't nearly as good
as the mimicry of birds, and often Lilly would have to record it and slow it down before it began
to resemble the vague approximation of speech, bottlenose dolphins appeared to recognize the
rhythm and inflections of a complete sentence. Lilly began to wonder if we had
mistaken the cetacean's lack of engineering or reluctance
to dominate their
environment the way humans had for intellectual inferiority. "We are severely handicapped in
our efforts to measure the intelligence of individuals of other species than our own," Lilly
argued. "We use inappropriate yardsticks derived from our own history as primates with hands and
legs." Language, Lilly hypothesized, was a more accurate measure of intelligence, and if he could
demonstrate the cetaceans had the capacity for it, not only would it alter humanity's
perceptio
n of our own supremacy, we could join these creatures in intellectual
teamwork, teaching one another what we knew of the world and the nature of existence. And
not being one to doubt his own intuition, Lilly was prepared to gamble it all on his
ability to prove it, despite having no idea how. As additional preparation for the live-in
experiment with the dolphin, Dr. Lilly had asked Margaret to read Planet of the Apes by Pierre
Boulle and report her thoughts. "Why why why must there be a dom
inance and a subordination?"
Margaret wrote of the novel. "Why must man take over or why must the apes take over?" Dr. Lilly
shared her sentiment. Among the other intelligent life on the planet, humans likely had a reputation
for cruelty and imposing their will at any cost. If interspecies communication was possible, with
both parties expending effort to accomplish it, the cetaceans might need convincing. Lilly had
envisioned sailing out into the ocean to play music for them, something whic
h they might
recognize as art, a testament that humans were worth giving a chance. But as Margaret
settled into her first week of the experiment, she found Peter didn't need convincing; he
was eager to communicate. "Hello, good boy!" Peter was responding enthusiastically to his first
vocal lessons and Margaret believed they were on their way to establishing the foundations
of dialogue, using numbers, names, objects, and greetings to build a basic vocabulary.
"English, Peter! Pronouns! Say,
'Margaret!'" Colors were avoided as it wasn't known if dolphins
saw them the same way humans do. Margaret would only acknowledge Peter's humanoid responses. "I
do not respond to his attention-getting whistles and clicks," she wrote in her journal,
"they mean nothing to me and I make that clear." "Come right out with the English, Peter.
Don't even think in your own language. English all the time." "My first goal will be to get
him to pronounce any word clearly and know the meaning," Margare
t wrote. "This will probably
be a time coming and is the hardest step." But Peter had trouble focusing. As a young
dolphin, he was hyper, always tangling himself in Margaret's legs and knocking her over, bruising
and biting her shins. "I look forward to the day when Peter will yell at me rather than nip at
me to show his displeasure," Margaret wrote. As promised, Dr. Lilly did not interfere with
Margaret and Peter's dyadic relationship. He would frequently sequester himself in the sensory
deprivation tank he'd installed on the premises. As he floated in the darkness, Lilly hoped to
find answers to the problems and setbacks that plagued his research. But whether these
answers came from his own unconscious or if the tank itself served as a type of
telepathic conference room, Lilly was unsure. In an effort to remove as much external stimuli
as possible and test its effects on the mind, Dr. Lilly invented the sensory deprivation tank
in 1954, using a modified diving mask. Dark,
silent, and floating in salt water heated to
body temperature to simulate the feeling of weightlessness, Lilly not only disproved
a prevailing hypothesis that the lack of sensory input would cause the human mind
to fall asleep, he discovered the means of accessing a psychedelic state which would
become the forefront of his curiosities, bleeding into every aspect of his professional and
personal life. "And I immediately found that this was a doorway. This is not an isolation tank;
that's a
cover story. It is really a doorway into the universe. It allows one to escape one's
body. One's soul can leave and one can clean one's karma from one soul and become pure spirit."
Long flotation sessions would gradually give way to waking dreams and hallucinations. Lily
began to think of them as conferences where he would meet with three entities he would come to
know as the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or E.C.C.O. for short. Although terrifying at
first, over his years in sensory dep
rivation Lilly understood E.C.C.O. as a localized branch
of a much larger cosmic institution. They were his guides, responsible for orchestrating what Lilly
called the "long-term coincidences" of his life, fatefully steering him in specific directions.
"E.C.C.O. In Italian, it means 'this is it.' But it means to me the Earth Coincidence
Control Office, which is one of god's field offices. E.C.C.O. runs our lives, though we
won't admit it." It was during the first E.C.C.O. conference in 1958
that the entities convinced
Lilly to abandon the results-oriented constraints of government-funded research, divorce his spouse,
and throw himself headlong into his dolphin studies. According to Lilly's writing, the United
States intelligence service wished for him to continue his neural mapping research under their
auspices in order to investigate its potential military application. They were equally interested
in his experiments in sensory deprivation and to what extent it might make a s
ubject more
suggestible to outside influence. But Lilly was on the cusp of discovering non-human intelligence,
and he would see it through, even if it meant doing so on his own. Although Lilly entertained
the idea that E.C.C.O. was merely a manifestation of what he unconsciously wanted for himself and
that nothing supernatural was occurring in the isolation tank, the results were the same. Lilly
filed for divorce, sold much of his property, and purchased land on Saint Thomas Island, a locat
ion
replete with wild bottlenose dolphins and easily accessible by boat or plane so that equipment
and materials could be continuously shipped in. During his initial years on St. Thomas, using
an underwater microphone called a hydrophone, Dr. Lilly attempted to catalog the various
whistles, clicks, and screeches the creatures emitted to gather evidence for the presence
of Delphinese, the dolphin language. He found much more variety and complexity in their
vocalizations than in the repetiti
ous cries of other animals which Lilly believed were only meant
to communicate danger or sexual desire to those near them. Older dolphins also appeared to have
a much broader vocabulary than young dolphins who were likely just learning the language. But even
if Lilly could understand Delphinese, he was not equipped to speak it; the frequencies are too high
with much of it beyond the range of human hearing. Their language processing abilities
were also perhaps more advanced than our own. Lil
ly found they had a vocal emitter on
either side of their nose and were capable of carrying on a clicking conversation with their
right and a whistle conversation with their left, each completely independently of the other.
A human equivalent might be having a verbal conversation while simultaneously having
a separate conversation in sign language. Although learning Delphinese remained a goal
of Lilly's, perhaps with the aid of technology, conversation in this language would not come
easil
y. The shortest and seemingly easiest path to interspecies communication
was to teach the dolphins English. So when simple curiosity and a love for dolphins
brought Margaret Howe to Lilly's laboratory in early 1964, where despite having no formal
scientific background, she'd volunteered her help however she could be of service, Lilly saw this
as a cosmic coincidence orchestrated by E.C.C.O. But it was this very combination of Lilly's
two vocations--the scientific and the psychedelic--that w
ould ultimately dismantle
the feeble scaffolding that held this research together. By the end of the first month, Peter was
vocalizing out of the water more often than not, which Margaret took as a promising
sign. "He responds with a good 95 humanoid," she noted, "only occasional Delphinese
comments on the side." And although he was far from intelligible, Margaret thought Peter
was showing promise in his pronunciation. Consonants were difficult in general, and in
order to achieve the M in
Margaret's name, Peter had to roll his blowhole slightly underwater
to approximate its sound. "Hello, Margaret!" "Hello, Margaret!" Peter's ability to focus continued to deteriorate,
and the reason for it was something they didn't foresee during their trial period with Pam.
Although Dr. Lilly estimated Peter to be at the right age to learn a language peter was also
going through puberty. "I find that his desires are hindering our relationship," Margaret wrote.
"I can play with him for just
so long now and he gets an erection and the lesson is broken."
It was also making Peter aggressive and he would repeatedly ram into Margaret's body during
their sessions. Margaret's initial idea was to occasionally punctuate their lessons with day-long
periods inside the tanks of Pam and Sissy, the two female dolphins kept on the premises.
"Another thought I had on the subject," Margaret wrote in her journal, "is whether or not it
would be best for the human to somehow find a way to satisfy
the dolphin's sexual needs without
another dolphin. This may strengthen the bond between the dolphin and the human." Outside of St.
Thomas, Lilly's claims of dolphin intelligence and language capabilities began to gain traction.
His first book, Man and Dolphin, which he'd confided to colleagues that he'd written in a
single weekend while high on amphetamines, was becoming a hit. It confronted its readers in the
opening paragraph with the following prediction: "Within the next decade or two
, the human species
will establish communication with another species; non-human, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine, but definitely highly
intelligent, perhaps even intellectual." Popular culture was responding to his claims
with comics, movies, television shows... The world was embracing the idea that certain
animals were smarter than previously believed. Although Lilly had severed his military ties,
the united States Navy was conducting their own experiments in deciph
ering Delphinese.
"These two dolphins are calling to each other. We can hear them but we don't
know what they mean... yet! The United States Navy intends to find out." The
Navy's Marine Mammal Program began their research in tandem with Lilly, hoping to discover what the
dolphins newfound intelligence could do for them. "With its fine sonar and ability to plunge to the
depths, it could be trained to locate underwater objects, to guard harbors against enemy swimmers
and submarines, and to a
ssist in various kinds of underwater operations." Lilly rejected what he
now saws an exploitation of a species he believed to be on a similar cognitive footing as humans.
"We are not dealing with small-brained animals in short-term experiments," he argued. And although
he was guilty of it in the past, he now realized that keeping dolphins in such strict confinement
was a breach of trust and goodwill. Lilly felt his dolphin point laboratory was more humane
as it was accommodating to both spe
cies and a prototype for facilities Lilly envisioned
would be built all over the world's coast, where humans and dolphins could, quote, "meet
on a more equal footing, free to come and go." "To talk and make sense with the dolphins we must
meet them at least halfway in their own element, Lilly wrote. "In the sea water, we will
communicate. We must learn to live wetly." And despite the hurdles ahead, Margaret was
pleased with the progress she was making, even beginning to imagine future sessi
ons in the
dolphin house stretching years, or even decades. "I now am no longer thinking in
terms of three months," she wrote. "I think in terms of forever." But as she began
dealing with Peter's sexual urges herself, using her hands and feet, and documenting her
methods in a diary that would later be published, she seemed unable to predict the scandal
that would unfold as a result. To her, it was a clinical solution to the distraction that
plagued their lessons and an opportunity to bond
with Peter. Both of these things, Margaret
reasoned, were in service to their goal of inter-species communication. Dr. Lilly had
meanwhile become preoccupied with the recesses of his own consciousness, going longer and longer
in sensory deprivation. Referring to his own mind, Lilly wrote: "It seems to contain (or be part
of) some large inner universes beyond my present understanding." And in an effort to go deeper,
Lilly turned to a substance that was becoming the center of scientific inter
est across the United
States. "This is a glass of water--colorless, tasteless. It contains 100 gamma of LSD25.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly called acid or LSD, is an intense hallucinogenic
substance originally marketed as a cure for various psychological conditions. Although it
had been around for nearly two decades, the 1960s saw the beginning of its widespread medicinal
use. "Everything is in color and-and I can feel the air. I can-I can see it, I can see all the
molecules." Agai
nst the advice of his colleagues, Lilly would take it alone, closing himself
in his sensory deprivation tank for hours, hoping to unravel whatever mysteries wait in
the darkness. It was during these trips that Lilly began to believe the dolphins were
attempting to telepathically communicate with him. "They programmed the trips, as I
found out later, and took me out into the universe in a very expanded way." "They?" "The
dolphins." "Really?" "The three dolphins, yes." As Margaret neared the
end of her 10-week
long experiment, she was no closer to conversing with Peter in English than when she'd
started. "One, two, three, four, five, six." And after more than two months inside the
dolphin house, with her sinuses stinging from salt water and her legs splotched
with bruises, Margaret was exhausted. Her sexual interactions with peter had become
increasingly relaxed. "I started out afraid of Peter's mouth and afraid of Peter's sex," Margaret
wrote. "It has taken Peter about two mo
nths to teach me, and me about two months to learn, that
I am free to involve myself completely with both." She clarified that she made no secret
of this aspect of their relationship. Although she described her own approach to
it as loving, it was not meant to be private, and Margaret emphasized that other people were
often present. But these caveats would do little to stop their intimacy from ultimately defining
the entire experiment, once it became public knowledge. Once the ten weeks wer
e over, Margaret
and Dr. Lilly had originally planned to resume the experiment for a longer duration, but Lilly found
himself struggling to fund it. Although he had financed the creation of the dolphin laboratory on
his own, with the help of some cosmic coincidence, he was relying on a few financial
backers, namely NASA, to sustain it. In 1961, Dr. Lilly had attended a meeting at
the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia, along with many of America's premier
astrophysicists, cosmologists,
and biochemists. The meeting was called by a radio astronomer
named Frank Drake, who is conducting the very first search for interstellar radio signals
that might have come from extraterrestrial life. But everywhere Drake looked, the cosmos
was speechless. He had the technology, but he needed the outside perspective of his peers
to refine his searching methods. Their meeting, which included a young Carl Sagan, led to the
drake equation: a formula used to determine the likelihood of a plane
t being home to alien life,
giving his search the narrowed parameters he'd hoped for. But there was a complication, one that
prompted Dr. Lilly's invitation to the meeting: even if they were successful in finding an
alien civilization, one with an entirely different evolutionary environment, how would they
communicate with them? "There was a feeling that this effort to communicate with dolphins," Carl
Sagan later wrote, "was in some sense comparable to the task that will face us in communic
ating
with intelligent species on another planet. Lilly argued that bridging the communication gap
with non-human intelligent life on earth was an urgent precursor to finding extraterrestrials. Or
more alarmingly, of them finding us. "I believe it is important that we consider possible ways of
dealing with non-human intelligent life before the duty is forced upon us," he wrote. In John
C. Lilly, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan believed they had found a unique kind of brilliance, and
a kindred s
pirit who was unafraid of what his scientific contemporaries thought of him. They
were so impressed that they commemorated their union with handmade pins, and the unofficial
group title: The Order of the Dolphins. NASA, then only a few years old, gave Lilly
a grant through their biosciences program, and the members of the Order of the Dolphins
would regularly send each other coded messages to decipher, stoking their excitement. And over
the subsequent years, as their search of the cosmos fo
r alien intelligence turned up nothing,
the possibility of inter-species communication, at least in their lifetime, seemed to hinge
on Lilly. Carl Sagan would regularly visit Lilly's lab on Sr. Thomas, where he would go
SCUBA diving and interact with the dolphins. He wrote of one memorable encounter where
he began petting a dolphin named Elvar, and after Sagan withdrew his hand, Elvar seemed
to shout, "More!" Sagan relayed the story to Dr. Lilly, who responded, "Good, that's one
of the wor
ds he knows." But empirical, reproducible evidence that dolphins were capable
of learning and speaking a complex language at the conversational level continued to elude Lilly
and Margaret, and the critics were beginning to outnumber the supporters. "If 1-2-3 said
with very poor intelligibility by a dolphin is indicative of the giant-brained animal's
ability to speak, and therefore to learn, language," one critic wrote, "what is to be said
of a parrot's clear-cut 'Paulie wants a cracker furt
hermore.' If the parrot is then given a
cracker, have we established communication with an alien species?" With nothing concrete to show
for his efforts, funding for the dolphin house was drying up. The remedy, Lilly thought,
was for the dolphins and humans to converge on the same mental wavelength, and he would
turn to his newfound substance for help. "A study was made of the effect of one of these
on a cat, which prior to receiving a dose of the agent, reacted normally when confined with
a
mouse. When exposed to an extremely small amount of the agent, the cat's personality completely
changed." Although a transgressive idea, Lilly was far from the only scientist giving
acid to animals to see how they reacted. In fact, Lilly had already begun giving it to the
other dolphins in the laboratory in an attempt to make them more communicative. After giving 100
micrograms to Pam, a typically timid dolphin, Dr. Lilly noticed her becoming more extroverted and
eager to interact with h
im. But Margaret's problem with Peter wasn't that he was uncommunicative
or introverted. Peter had the opposite problem. "Look, John, Margaret said to
Lilly. "I'm devoting my time, my energy, my love, and my life to working with
Peter, Sissy, and Pam. I want no interference with my aims for that work. If you want to
do your experiments on solitude and LSD, please keep them in the isolation room." Despite
Margaret's protest, Lilly administered 200 micrograms to Peter and recorded his reactio
n for
several hours. "2600 hours, tape number eight, Peter and LSD. 200 microgram dose, continued.
This is about the beginning of the eighth hour." Whatever effect it had on Peter seemed to be
almost entirely internal, as the recordings feature little more than the analog hum of the
tape and the occasional motion of tank water. The introduction of LSD had accomplished
nothing, and it became a point of contention with Margaret and the other staff at the
dolphin point laboratory. Gregory Bat
eson, an anthropologist in charge of studying and
looking after the other dolphins kept on sight, left in protest. And without government grants or
allies who were willing to follow his new approach to enter species communication, LIlly had no
choice but to close his dolphin point laboratory after nearly a decade of research. Against his own
code of ethics, he moved the dolphins to a small building he'd rented in Miami, where they were
stored inside tanks barely wide enough to swim. Lilly c
ouldn't have been further from his
vision of living symbiotically in intellectual collaboration with the cetaceans. But the final
failure of the dolphin house experiment would come only a few weeks later, when Peter passed away.
"John called himself to tell me," Margaret later told the Guardian. "He said Peter had committed
suicide." Peter had reportedly stopped breathing, refusing to come up for air at the
surface of the tank where he was kept. Kathy, one of the dolphins from the televisio
n
show Flipper, suffered a similar fate after the show's production had ended. Richard
O'barry, the man who'd captured and trained the dolphins for Flipper, fell into
a lifetime of guilt and was later arrested for attempting to free other dolphins from
captivity. Dr. Lilly shared a similar guilt. "I thought I was on the wrong path, killing them
and putting electrodes in their heads, and so on. So I let the last three go. An old one who took
care of the two young ones that were there. And I
knew that the old one would teach the
young ones, so that it was safe to let them go." Of the many scientific accomplishments that
would take place throughout the late 1960s, interspecies communication was not among
them. Although Lilly's work would become the inspiration for several works of science
fiction... "Unwittingly, he had trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States..." Lilly's big win for the scientific community,
and humanity in general, fell short of what he an
d others who had put their trust in him had
hoped. After the publication of his third book, Programming and Meta-Programming in the Human
Biocomputer, which has been described as a guide to, quote, "jailbreak the mind using
LSD and sensory deprivation," Lilly began his ascent to counterculture juggernaut while also
becoming a scientific outcast. By the late 1960s, LSD had also become the subject of public fear.
"You are looking at a traveler who just bought a ticket for a very special kind
of a trip. The
cost? A few dollars, and his mind, over which he will very shortly have little or no control."
And Lilly was forced to return his allotment to Sandoz Laboratories, due to new restrictions
being placed on the substance. Without easy access to large quantities of lysergic acid, Lilly would
continue the experiments on himself with ketamine, an anesthetic he called "Vitamin K." The
frequency in which he subjected his body to it was punishing, injecting it into his
thigh 24 times
a day, for weeks at a time, leading to such near-death experiences as passing
out into a hot tub while under its effects. "Are you risking your life for this sort
of thing?" "I don't think in terms of risk. Evolution. Pushing. Getting there. Fast."
"When one is doing research on a substance," Lilly wrote, "one takes it so frequently that
outside observers can say you're addicted. But that's a very bad definition of addiction.
Any good research is obsessive and compulsive." "Is it possible
that this might
damage your mind permanently?" "Who's to say?" He continued writing books,
although his writing became stranger and more opaque with each publication. In his
autobiography, written largely in third person, Lilly refers to himself simply as The Scientist,
and begins the book prior to his birth, with multiple opening chapters of Lilly as a
formless entity residing in hyperspace before taking human form. "I talk about insanity,
which is what's going on in your own mind, and ou
tsanity, where you
communicate with those outside. As you know, if you give too much of
your insanity, they'll lock you up. Well, I tried doing as much as I could. They
didn't lock me up. They published it, and paid me." His days of publishing a journal such
as Science were replaced with write-ups and magazines like Magical Blend and High Times.
Experiments in his dolphin point laboratory would be reduced to their most lurid details. When
a sensationalized depiction appeared in Hustler, a
mortified Margaret Howe went around buying
every copy she could find in order to get them off the shelves, before realizing how futile
such an attempt was. Lilly's sensory deprivation conferences with E.C.C.O., now regularly under the
influence of Vitamin K, led to some unforgettable hallucinations. "I took 150 milligrams of K and
suddenly the Earth Coincidence Control Office removed my penis and handed it to me.
And I screamed in terror. My wife, Toni, came running into the bedroom, and sh
e
said, "It's still attached." So I shouted at the ceiling, "who's in charge up there, a
bunch of crazy kids?" The answer came back: 'Well, you had an unconscious fear, so we put you through
it.'" According to Lilly's writing, E.C.C.O was becoming increasingly concerned that his
Vitamin K use had derailed him from his purpose. "The human vehicle had become seduced by K," one
of the entities reported. Lily believed that his second near-death experience while on vitamin K,
a bicycle crash wh
ich left him hospitalized for months, was orchestrated by E.C.C.O. in order to
shock him out of his dependence on the substance. And just as E.C.C.O. wanted, by the late 1970s,
Lilly once again felt the call to return to the cetaceans, embarking on what he called "the
second epoch of human-dolphin communication." He named the new project Janus, after the ancient
Roman god of transition, with the two heads of the deity symbolizing human and cetacean. Now that
computers were more readily avai
lable and less expensive, Lilly felt equipped to conceive of
a new language, one which dolphins and humans could both learn--a type of interspecies Esperanto
which better incorporated their high-frequency, underwater, Delphinic language. An
engraving near his new dolphin pool read: "We cry to you from our watery depths, in the long
loneliness, come speak with us." Lilly predicted such a request would be fulfilled in five years,
time enough to build a dolphin-human dictionary and for both sp
ecies to learn it. But despite his
ambitions, Janus would be as short-lived as the dolphin point laboratory. Over its few years of
operation, Lilly doubled down on his efforts to telepathically link with dolphins while in sensory
deprivation. "They did something unexpected, as I demanded on ESP." "Oh it was ESP? No
wording?" "No words." And he was unable to secure funding or recruit qualified scientists and
engineers to work on the project. Janus remained largely staffed by young, under-qua
lified
volunteers. "They were bursting with energy and pride," Lilly said of his volunteers, "but
lacked real understanding of the requirements of documented scientific research. The full
array of talent necessary to systematically develop the computer software and advance
the research agenda never arrived." "Hello." "Hello. Okay." Lilly also felt his facilities
were inadequate, thrown together with charity and luck. And the pair of two-year-old dolphins Lilly
had acquired were much more c
onfined than Peter, Sissy, and Pam had been inside his dolphin house
a decade prior. So Lilly released them into the Atlantic, marking the end of what would be his
final attempt at interspecies communication. "Well, my prediction was very poor. We
don't have interspecies communication yet." Despite his failures, it's
inarguable that Dr. Lilly's contributions, both scientific and psychedelic, have
left a permanent mark on modern culture. His sensory deprivation tanks, popularized in
the ear
ly 1980s with the release of the film Altered States... "I don't like being out
of contact for these long periods of time." ...would go on to see widespread application for
therapeutic and meditative use across the world. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which
prohibits the act of hunting, killing, capture and/or harassment of any marine mammal, is often
credited to Lilly's research with cetaceans and the resulting shift in public perception of them.
Margaret Howe would go on to ma
rry John Lovett, the photographer who took many of the photos
of the experiment, and the dolphin house was transformed back into an exclusively human
dwelling, where Margaret and John would go on to live and raise their children. Although Lilly and
Margaret were likely the only ones to document a concerted effort to teach dolphins English, the
quest to break the inter-species communication barrier continues as marine biologists across the
world seek to build the Delphinic Rosetta stone. Jac
k Kassowitz with speakdolphin.com has
discovered a way to catalog their vocabulary, not with Lilly's method of graphing sound waves,
but with cross sections of their underwater acoustic bubbles. "In fact, if you put microphones
all around me, you find that when I speak it comes out literally like a bubble, this giant bubble
that moves forward. So we have discovered a way to take those outgoing sounds, slice across them, and
take a picture of them that represents the sound that that animal i
s using to label whether it's a
fish, or a ball, or danger, or whatever it is. And that's how we're beginning to build the lexicon.
He has a list of questions he's prepared to ask the creatures once he's able, such as if they
believe in god or an afterlife, and whether they have some way of preserving their knowledge,
like an oral tradition or mnemonic device. Dr. Denise Herzing of the wild dolphin project has
been non-invasively researching spotted dolphins in the Bahamas since 1985. Using
a wearable
underwater translator she calls a CHAT box, Dr. Herzing and her team are attempting to
teach wild dolphins their own Delphinic words for objects like rope and scarf. "So the way it
works is we're in the water, I can push a sound. For example, this is the whistle for "scarf." This
headset just said "scarf" in English. So I know that's the sound I played. Now, if the dolphins
decide to mimic this whistle, they'll mimic it, the computer will recognize it in pretty close
to real ti
me, and I'll hear the word "scarf" in my headset. Others, however, have decided
to follow the thread of Lilly's telepathic connection with dolphins. Joan Ocean, who met
Lilly in the late 70s, continues his work in extra sensory perception, believing that not
only are dolphins as intelligent as humans, but they are capable of time travel and
interdimensional astral projection. "Well, the dolphins are not really linear thinkers
as we are. They are multi-dimensional, and that means that they c
an be here in physical
form, in the oceans of the world and the rivers, but they also have another part of their mind
that's connected to the greater universal mind, to higher consciousness." In 2001, John C. Lilly's
ashes were scattered to the sea. He died of heart failure at the age of 86. The legacy he left
behind is a complicated one. Many have hearkened back to his tendency to philosophize and speculate
in place of gathering empirical evidence. And even Lilly's bedrock thesis, that cet
aceans have a
complex language or capable of learning one, has been under scrutiny. In the book Are Dolphins
Really Smart? Dr. Justin Gregg argues that, although dolphins can display impressive feats
of mimicry and self-awareness, evidence for a full Delphinic language is non-existent.
"Clicks and whistles that dolphins produce are probably used to convey messages about their
emotional states or intentions," Dr. Gregg writes, "not the type of complex or semantically rich
information found
in human language." Even many of Lilly's colleagues, such as computer engineer Ted
Nelson, have been outspoken about the esteem many hold for him being a misinterpretation. "I worked
for Lilly for a year, from mid-1962 to mid-1963, and I knew him pretty well. He was fairly ruthless
and a great con man, but good company." Although, it's worth noting that Nelson goes on to confess
that Margaret Howe wasn't the only one engaged in inappropriate acts with Dr. Lilly's dolphins.
"She liked me, an
d she as she swam by she would often present her genitals, which I would
caress and sometimes finger. She liked that. I contemplated coming in on a Saturday, at
a time no one would be around and actually attempting intercourse. I was young and horny
and I believe capable. But the idea that I might be found dead, naked, and wrecked by
dolphin teeth deterred me. Others who knew Dr. Lilly speak of him with reverence. "I
loved him very much, and I loved his work, and I think it's actually under
appreciated.
I think he is one of the most important scientists of the 21st century." He served as
the inspiration for films, novels, songs... ...and as if the title and subject
matter of the video game series ECCO the Dolphin weren't revealing enough,
the creator has admitted to being a Lilly fan. When viewed as an entire body of work, Dr. Lilly's
experiments in inter-species communication, sensory deprivation, and hallucinogenics, were
all guided by the same mission: to reach the next ev
olutionary frontier and become something beyond
human, whatever that might be. His destination was unclear, but he pursued it obsessively, perhaps
even selfishly. And those who denounce Lilly do so for the same reasons as those who celebrate
him" his willingness to sacrifice everything, including his own mind, to get there. "Well I
suppose, for our culture, the really special thing about you is the fact that you really have
a foot in both worlds: the scientific camp and the mystical camp. A
nd in a way you seem dissatisfied
with with both of them. Neither camp seems to provide an adequate enough model of reality
for you." "My own beliefs are unbelievable."
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