by Susan Casey
“I see you’re working with the Lilly files,” the reference librarian said to me, sliding over the first gray box. She had close-cropped silver hair and a no-nonsense nautical air. “He was an interesting one.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure we’ve ever quite gotten this down. Can you please let us know what you find?”
Lugging my box to a long wooden reading table, I thought about what that might be. In the decades after Lilly’s first, ill-fated dolphin encounter, his career took many hairpin turns. Putting the Marine Studios in the rearview mirror, he resolved to correct his mistakes and continue his research: “I was stimulated and inspired…to devote more and more effort, time, and money to these charming creatures.” By 1957, Lilly believed he had come up with a safe, anesthetic-free way to access the dolphin’s brain. He even experimented on himself, hammering a sleeve into his own skull. Once this was accomplished, it was then possible to insert electrodes and inject chemicals “through small needles anywhere in the brain.”
The upside of being able to poke around in there, Lilly believed, was to gain push-button control of a creature’s responses. Lilly was fascinated by the sheer size of the dolphin brain—a hallmark, he believed, of advanced intelligence—coupled with the distinctive noises they made, their odd cacophony of sounds. Did these sounds represent their emotional states? Their thoughts and opinions? Bawdy jokes? No one knew. But if you could send a dolphin into spasms of happiness by prodding a particular part of his brain, then in theory you could decode the communications that followed. You could begin to translate his language. Possibly, even, you could deduce what he was doing with that big brain of his.
New technique in hand, Lilly returned to Marine Studios and was presented with Dolphin #6. The skull hammering went smoothly; almost immediately Lilly managed to locate the pleasure center of the dolphin’s brain (and also a spot that made the animal roll his eyes forward and backward). Whenever the electrodes hit this zone the animal would vocalize exuberantly: “Whistles, buzzings, raspings, barks, and Bronx cheerlike noises were emitted.” Lilly wondered if the dolphin could be taught to stimulate this area himself as a kind of reward; to test this idea he built a switch that Dolphin #6 could push with his beak. “While I was assembling it,” Lilly wrote, “I noticed that the dolphin was closely watching what I was doing.”
Dolphin #6 not only learned to reward himself by working the switch, he began to do it before Lilly had even finished the wiring. This instant uptake got Lilly’s attention. Other lab animals had required far more time to figure things out: “I had the rather uneasy and eerie feeling that there was a good deal more purpose behind this animal’s behavior than I had ever seen when working with monkeys.” Dolphin #6 pressed the switch so incessantly that it eventually jammed; the dolphin responded with a loud tantrum of every noise he could seemingly make, including, according to Lilly, “an explosive series of air-borne vocalizations.” Once the switch was fixed, Dolphin #6 went right back at it, pressing with such alacrity that he pleasured himself into a grand mal seizure. “I suddenly realized that he was going through too intense a stimulation of his brain near the motor cortex,” Lilly wrote, adding sadly: “Once again death had come in our experiments because of our ignorance. Slowly but surely we were learning the difference between us and these animals, and how fatal our mistakes could be.”
Afterward, Lilly studied the tape of Dolphin #6’s outburst. Because dolphin sounds are much faster and higher-pitched than human speech, he slowed the replay down. To his amazement the dolphin seemed to be mimicking phrases used by his human handlers, as well as their laughter. Later, Lilly would present a paper that recounted how Dolphin #6’s behavior had affected him:
We began to have feelings which I believe are best described by the word “weirdness.”…The feeling of weirdness came on us as the sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming words in our language. We felt we were in the presence of Something or Someone, who was on the other side of a transparent barrier which up to this point we hadn’t even seen. The dim outlines of a someone began to appear.
This was a pretty seismic shift for a government scientist—and some highly unusual language for the gray-suited fifties. But Lilly wasn’t your average scientist. As a boy growing up Catholic in St. Paul, Minnesota, Lilly had visions and premonitions in church; in his early teens, he spent hours debating life and death, the purpose of love, the nature of the universe. At sixteen, he wrote an article for his prep school newspaper posing the question: “How can the mind render itself sufficiently objective to study itself?” At twenty-three, he observed his own mother’s brain surgery.
Among the archives, there were at least fifty-three cartons of recordings, from the Marine Studios experiments and many others, of dolphins emoting. On some tapes the animals chittered and squawked to one another, sounds Lilly referred to as “delphinese.” On others, human voices can be heard coaching the animals through exercises intended to teach them English, or as Lilly put it, “humanoid.” After all, babies started off jabbering and crying, and yet somehow those noises became intelligible speech—so why not dolphins?
By 1958, Lilly had decided to go all-in, quitting the medical mainstream and moving to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands to establish a new human-dolphin laboratory known as the Communication Research Institute (CRI). His goals for CRI were not modest: “I visualize a project as vast as our present space program, devoting our best minds, our best engineering brains, our vast networks of computer people and material and time on this essentially peaceful mission of interspecies communication, right here on this planet.” It would be an entirely new type of facility, a place where researchers would not merely study dolphins but live with them in specially designed buildings. This total immersion, Lilly explained, was imperative if the dolphins were to “learn our language and ways.”
The strangest and most bemusing thing about all this, it seemed to me, was that despite Lilly’s audacious and quixotic Caribbean plans, his desire to work “continuously at the edge of mystery,” and his pronouncements about dolphins being superior to man—every single buttoned-down, tight-lidded government agency you can imagine signed on to the project. Grants rolled in from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, and NASA, among others.
They all had their reasons for caring about dolphins, most of them quite awful. In the Cold War murk of surveillance and paranoia, Lilly’s dolphin brain experiments were proof that minds could be controlled; when the Department of Defense dealt with Russian and Chinese spies, knowing where to stick the electrodes would come in very handy. Over at NASA, they hoped to communicate with intelligent aliens; dolphins seemed promising for a trial run. The Navy wanted to deconstruct dolphin sonar, which was insanely refined compared to a clunky submarine’s, and to figure out how the animals made deep dives without decompression.
Lilly had other ideas, too, about how various agencies might benefit from dolphins: “Obviously, if we establish communication it may help us to solve many of our own marine problems.” He suggested using the animals to retrieve—and deliver—missiles, pinpoint shipwreck survivors, detect enemy submarines, and patrol the ocean like a finned military police. Operating in a seascape in which they could see but we could not, dolphins would be the ultimate stealth marauders: “In psychological warfare they might sneak up on an enemy submarine sitting on the bottom and shout something into the listening gear…” Lilly also mused that dolphins could “help us to obtain new information, data, and natural laws about fisheries, oceanography, marine biology, navigation, linguistics, various sciences of the brain, and space.”
It was a lot to ask of an animal, but Lilly set out to create a facility that could contain these goals. “I started from scratch,” he wrote, “carving the new facilities directly from the jungle and the wild tropical shore line.” There would be a series of seaside laboratories, offices and dolphin pools, connected by breezeways
and observation decks. When the island topography didn’t cooperate, a Navy demolition team stepped in with explosives and blasted out chunks of the shoreline. Lilly, meanwhile, relocated his family to St. Thomas. In keeping with the theme of mercurial change, he brought a new wife and some new children. Lilly had recently divorced from his first wife, Mary, with whom he’d had two sons, and remarried a fashion model, Elisabeth Bjerg, who had three children of her own. The brood was rounded out to an even half dozen when Bjerg and Lilly had a baby girl right before leaving for the Virgin Islands.
All that remained was to load up the dolphins. In 1960, two more Marine Studios bottlenoses, Lizzie and Baby, were airlifted from Miami. Plans went awry when both dolphins perished shortly after arrival. Lizzie died after being dropped onto a cement floor; Baby succumbed to a bacterial infection. Frustrated, Lilly returned to the mainland, studied more carefully how to transport dolphins by plane, and came back with Elvar and Tolva, a male and female bottlenose.
Almost immediately, Elvar distinguished himself. He was a “bold and pushy dolphin,” according to research notes, with an expansive vocal range. Along with the standard whistles and clicks, Elvar emitted “a series of barks, wails, moans, buzzings, trumpetings, banjo-like sounds, and quacking.” Despite the eccentricity of the research—one photo I found showed Elvar’s English teacher, Ginger Nadell, in the tank with him during a “vocalization lesson,” holding the dolphin across her lap—it seemed like progress was being made.
Leafing through photos and documents from the early days of CRI, I was struck by what a halcyon moment it must have been. If you had frozen time in 1961 you would have captured Lilly at the peak of his glory, knee-deep in enviable research beneath the palm trees, surrounded by a bevy of gorgeous female assistants, approaching the border of what seemed like a shimmering new frontier. He also published a book that summer, Man and Dolphin, and it began with this bold statement: “Within the next decade or two the human species will establish communication with another species: nonhuman, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine; but definitely highly intelligent, perhaps even intellectual.” The book was a hit with the public; widespread fascination with Lilly’s predictions made him a celebrity. Who wouldn’t want to converse with a supersmart dolphin? Lilly’s circles grew increasingly glamorous: some of the era’s most brilliant minds were captivated by CRI’s research—Carl Sagan, Aldous Huxley, and Richard Feynman among them. But for Lilly the empirical scientist, it was the beginning of the end.
By 1968, CRI was gone. The eight dolphins in Lilly’s program had either died or been released into the sea. Elisabeth Bjerg had left him and taken the kids. All of his funding spent, his staff dispersed, Lilly traveled west to Esalen, a spiritual retreat in Big Sur, California. “I shut my lab because I didn’t want to continue to run a concentration camp for my friends, the dolphins,” Lilly wrote later, but it’s clear there were other factors.
Lilly’s problems began when a group of high-profile scientists criticized Man and Dolphin for its mix of giddy claims unaccompanied by proof. (If you’re going to assert that dolphins can teach us about space, in other words, eventually you’ll need to back that up.) “Scientifically unsound and naïve,” read the review in Natural History. “How not to do scientific research.” “Borderline irresponsible…Anecdotes are used to launch sweeping speculations,” the famed biologist E. O. Wilson wrote, dismissing the book: “Lilly’s writing differs from that of Herman Melville and Jules Verne not just in its more modest literary merit but more basically in its humorless and quite unjustified claim to be a valid scientific report.” A Navy researcher named Bill Evans summed up the prevailing mood, telling The Wall Street Journal: “I find Dr. Lilly’s work very interesting. I like Dr. Seuss, too.” But bad book reviews alone wouldn’t have derailed CRI. Those were merely war drums on the horizon, the distant beat of troubles that hadn’t arrived yet. The real damage occurred when Lilly began a run of experiments that involved LSD and interspecies sex.
It’s not surprising, of course, that a neuroscientist would dabble with mind-altering chemicals. In the early sixties LSD was a legal substance, considered promising for overcoming trauma and alcoholism, among other afflictions. But Lilly didn’t sample LSD so much as fall madly in love with it, immersing himself—and his dolphins—in this new hallucinogenic world. “I read practically everything that had been published about acid and acid trips,” he wrote. “I proposed trying LSD on dolphins as an aid to my understanding of the substance and some of the physiological dangers of its use. Each of the six dolphins tested apparently had very good trips with no problems attendant upon their breathing, heart action, or swimming abilities. These experiments gave me confidence to go ahead and try it on myself.” (It’s hard to know how Lilly determined that the dolphins enjoyed their LSD trips; notes indicate that after being injected with the drug, the animals floated stoically and silently in their tanks.)
Psychedelics, Lilly believed, were the key to gaining access not just to the dolphins’ inner lives but to the sanctum of the human brain itself. To experience the heightened states of consciousness he sought, the mind had to be untethered from its usual distractions, floating free in the sea of existence. In his self-experimentation, Lilly took LSD while encased in an isolation tank—a device he had invented for the U.S. Army, which wanted to study the effects of sensory deprivation. The tank was lightless, a dark womb filled with 93-degree saltwater that held a person afloat at neutral buoyancy. Usually the tank was soundproof as well, but in St. Thomas, Lilly had the dolphins’ vocalizations piped in while he was tripping, the better to commune with them.
He also constructed a flooded house, a prototype residence in which dolphins and humans could cohabit. Margaret Howe, a local waitress recruited to the project by Lilly, gamely moved in with Peter, a male bottlenose, for ten weeks, the two of them living in twenty-two inches of saltwater. Each day, Howe would tutor Peter extensively on things like manners, vocabulary, pronunciation, and math.
During the experiment, Howe took many notes. “The first few nights in the flooded room were awful. I was uncomfortable and hardly slept,” she wrote. Howe cropped her hair into a quarter-inch brush cut after discovering that she could never really get dry: Peter squirted her when she talked on the phone and splashed her as she was cooking and sprayed water onto her bed. Her groin became chapped. Algae grew on the walls.
Howe described Peter as a “naughty dolphin,” prone to ramming and nipping: “I carry a long-handled broom with me for that and ward him off.” Though she was convinced that her student’s humanoid speech was improving (despite his unfortunate lack of vocal chords), to her frustration he often expressed himself loudly in his native tongue: “I do not respond to his attention-getting clicks and whistles. They mean nothing to me and I make that clear.”
Judged by the goals Lilly had intended, the experiment was a failure: “My bed now has three inches of water in it,” Howe wrote. “My shins are bruised, up and down, from the constant butting with his nose and the front of his flippers. All of this fatigue was also combined with depression…wanting to get away and see some people.” She concluded: “To actually live with a dolphin twenty-four hours a day is a very taxing situation.”
In another way, Lilly’s cohabitation experiment succeeded a little too well. Peter began to follow Howe around the house with a constant erection, begging for sex. “He does not go away,” she wrote, italicizing for emphasis. “This is a problem, and it must be solved…I cannot go on having my shins belted about by lusty little Peter. It hurts!” The dolphin, a quick study, soon learned how to pin his roommate into corners. But Howe was nothing if not a trooper, and she eventually convinced herself that the dolphin’s attentions were “a very precious sort of thing.” At first tentatively and then more enthusiastically, Howe gave in to Peter’s desires, reasoning that satisfying the dolphin might create a tighter interspecies bond.
“This is obviously a sexy business,” Howe observed. “The mood i
s very gentle…still…hushed…all movements are slow…tone is very quiet…only slight murmurings from me.” But the frustrations continued: Howe couldn’t keep pace with Peter’s appetites, despite incorporating hand jobs into his daily routine.
Late in the afternoon, as the sun slanted lower through the library’s arched windows, I opened the third file box I’d ordered from the archives. The first item I pulled out was an essay Lilly had written for Oceans magazine in May 1977, titled “The Cetacean Brain.” The editor had sent Lilly’s manuscript back to him in galley form—twenty-one pages grammatically smoothed and typeset for publication—and attached a letter requesting that Lilly approve it with as few changes as possible. I thumbed through the pages: their margins were peppered with notes written in a spidery hand that I recognized as Lilly’s. Far from keeping his corrections to a minimum, Lilly had marked up most pages with edits and comments. In particular, he took exception to the copy editor’s use of the word “it” when referring to dolphins. For example: “Even if it revives there may be irreversible brain damage leading to death.” Lilly had crossed this out wherever it occurred, replacing “it” with “he.” Beside these changes he wrote crankily, underscoring with a bold line: “??? The whole point of this article is to remove ‘it’ from talking about them. Are you or me an ‘it’?”
By the time the piece was published, Lilly was back at dolphin research, having spent the better part of a decade engaged in various pharmaceutical and metaphysical pursuits. He had studied gestalt therapy and Gnosticism and est; dabbled in nudism, Rolfing, and hypnosis; spent much consciousness-expanding time in his isolation tank; and discovered an engaging new drug, ketamine, that he liked even better than LSD. The substance, which Lilly called “Vitamin K,” was a fast-acting anesthetic that catapulted users out of their bodies for short bursts of time (and unfortunately, as Lilly would learn, it was addictive). He had also remarried, to Antoinetta Lena Ficarotto, known as Toni, whom he met at a party in the Hollywood Hills. “Instantly I knew her and she knew me,” Lilly wrote of their first encounter. “We went into a sparkling cosmic love place together.” Shortly after that, Lilly and Toni created a new organization called the Human/Dolphin Foundation, based in Malibu.