Did NASA use Dolphins and LSD to Understand Aliens?

In 1962, NASA funded a program to build a communications center wherein scientists would learn dolphinese, literally learn dolphin language. The lead scientist's dream was to get a cetacean representative at the United Nations and by extension, learn how to talk to aliens. It did not go as planned, but it is a fantastic story. The story, somewhat obliquely, starts with Frank Drake. In 1960, Drake was a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Super quick sidebar because we need to know very briefly how radio astronomy actually works. Radio astronomy isn't exactly like the visual counterpart that we tend to think about when we talk about astronomy. Radio telescopes are giant receivers, huge dishes that bounce radio waves up to a focal point to amplify the signal for scientists to analyze. Similar to how visual telescopes use a mirror to focus the light to resolve, say, a distant planet. The difference between these two methods is the wavelength of the signal. All light is on the electromagnetic spectrum, and visual telescopes look at visible light, wavelengths of only a few hundred nanometers long. On the super short side, we get X-rays, and on the super long side, we get radio waves and microwaves. Radio telescopes can detect waves ranging from one millimeter to over ten meters long, long enough that scientists working with radio waves refer to radio light by frequency rather than wavelength. And because radio waves are so long, they're a lot easier to detect. Where visual telescopes need to focus very precisely on a target, radio telescopes can be set very specific frequently and just aim at a general part in the sky. The important takeaway here is that radio telescopes make listening for signals from alien civilizations a lot easier. Frank Drake wondered whether the dishes at Green Bank could detect signals from intelligent civilizations on faraway planets, so he devised a simple experiment. Point a radio telescope at a distant star and listen for any sounds using the frequency of interstellar hydrogen. Hydrogen has a known signal, can readily penetrate interstellar gas and dust clouds, and is the most abundant gas in our solar system. He reasoned that this common gas's emission signal would be known to any scientifically advanced species, and therefore would be the likeliest way to detect that species. It was a super simple experiment, and deliberately so. He didn't want to rack up costs that his colleagues might deem frivolous. Drake picked two target stars, Tau Centi and Epsilon Eridani. They're both about the size of the Sun, the first being a little bit older and the second a little bit younger. He reasoned that Sun-like stars were the most likely to host not just planets, but potentially a planetary system like ours. There might be another Earth out there. The project was called OSMA, in honor of the Queen of the Land of Oz. From April to July of 1960, Drake listened for six hours a day, slowly tuning the telescope's receiver and got nothing. At this point, the space age is just beginning in 1960. NASA was only two years old and just starting to train its first group of astronauts. And while no one in Washington was confident that this whole space thing would last beyond beating the Russians into orbit, scientists were more hopeful that this was the first step in exploring the cosmos. There was a feeling that we were on the cusp of finding alien life, whether on a neighboring planet or orbiting a distant star. Drake's Project OSMA was the first time scientists really thought about how we might talk to these hypothetical aliens. It wasn't just space scientists thinking about talking to other species. Neuroscientist Dr. John Lilly had a similar research interest, only his target species was a little closer to home, cetaceans, or aquatic mammals. Lilly's interest started in 1949, when he came face to face with a beached whale and was astounded by the size of its brain. Drawing a correlation between brain size and intelligence, he assumed the whale was highly intelligent, maybe even smart enough to communicate. That encounter kicked off regular trips wherein Lilly and his then-wife Mary would charter boats and sail around the Caribbean looking for other big-brained mammals. In the late 1950s, he stumbled on Marine Studios in Miami, which had a bottlenose dolphin in captivity. Lilly became obsessed with studying dolphin brains, and it wasn't his first foray into animal neurology. He'd done work mapping rhesus monkey brains before. But dolphins were a lot harder to study because they stopped breathing under anesthesia. Dolphins are conscious breathers. They don't have a diaphragm like we do that contracts to automatically fill and empty their lungs. They even sleep with one half of their brain awake to enable breathing and monitor for dangers in their environment. In 1957, Lilly stumbled on a new method. He was working on a dolphin in an operating theater when Mary, his then-wife, walked in. She noticed that the dolphin on the table seemed to be mimicking Lilly's voice, making a low wah-wah-wah sound, then switching to a higher pitch when his female assistant replied. When Mary told Lilly what was happening, he was seized by the idea that the dolphin was trying to mimic human speech. He interpreted this as an indication that the dolphin wanted to learn English. He realized that training dolphins to speak would be simpler than mapping their brains He developed this theory and published it in a 1961 book called Man and Dolphin. In it, Lilly went so far as to posit that dolphins could learn English and ultimately become such able communicators that their perspectives on science, history, economics, and politics could be represented via a cetacean chair at the United Nations. It's worth pointing out that 1961 was also the year that Frank Drake published the Drake Equation that he's most known for, the equation that estimates the number of communicative alien species in our galaxy. And it's not zero. So Frank Drake, still very into the idea of communicating with aliens, reads Man and Dolphin and is very impressed, not just with Lilly's research, but with the similarities to his own work. They were both scientists researching, quote, Dolphins were, in effect, an alien species we could learn to communicate with, making them an excellent analog to Drake's studies of interpreting alien signals. Drake's interest got NASA involved in Lilly's research. In 1962, the space agency announced a contract for research and communications between man and dolphins, results of which could apply if man encounters other species on distant planets. The $80,800 one-year contract funded establishment of the Communications Institute of St. Thomas VI. The Communications Institute of St. Thomas VI soon became known as the Dolphin House, since it was less an institute in the formal sense and more of a hybrid habitat that allowed humans and dolphins to live together. The upper floors were the lab space, which was extended and hung over the lower area, which was a giant pool open to the air and sunlight. The pool was also open at both ends, so the tides moving in and out could provide a natural cleaning system. Lilly ran the lab, it was his experiment, but daily operations fell under director Gregory Bateson. Andy Williamson was the vet responsible for managing the dolphins' welfare. The pool was home to three dolphins. Peter, a young male just entering maturity, Pamela, a shy and more fearful female, and Sissy, the pushiest and loudest of the group, also a female. Animal lover and non-scientist Margaret Howe Lovett was living on St. Thomas when she heard about the Dolphin House from her brother-in-law. She drove out one day, knocked on the door, and told a somewhat bewildered Bateson that she'd like to help if they needed it. He was a little taken aback by the unexpected guest, but Bateson nevertheless invited her in to watch and take notes on the dolphins. After a few hours, he was really impressed by how thorough and detailed she was. So in spite of her lack of training, Lovett soon became an integral part of the lab. She did most of the human-dolphin communication work, while Bateson focused on the dolphin-dolphin interactions. At one point, Carl Sagan, then a young astronomer also at Green Bank, visited the Dolphin House on Frank Drake's behalf. Drake was still interested in the potential of humans learning dolphinees, and even developed an experiment to test how dolphins communicated with each other. He proposed separating two dolphins to where they could hear each other, but not see each other. One would be taught how to ask for treats. The experiment came in seeing whether that dolphin would be able to explain to the other how to get treats. The experiment, unfortunately, never yielded a positive result. About a year in, Lovett got deeper into the experiment, quite literally. That the scientists closed up the lab and left at night didn't sit too well with her. She didn't like leaving the dolphins alone, and where the experiment was concerned, she felt that their communications efforts might be more fruitful if they had more contact with the humans. So she approached Lily with the idea of plastering the top part of the lab to make it waterproof, then flooding the whole house and living there. The flooded upper floors wouldn't be a huge tank, she'd still need to work, but with a couple feet of water, the dolphins could stay close to her at all times, even while she slept. Unsurprisingly, Lily went for the idea. I mean, this is the guy who wants dolphins represented at the United Nations. Of course he went for it. Lovett chose Peter, the young male, to be the test subject for this intensive, months-long trial of 24-7 contact. He had had the least amount of human language training at this point, so she figured he would be the best way to gauge whether increased contact actually made a difference. The house was fully converted by 1965. The setup had Lovett and Peter living in near-isolation together for six days a week. She slept on a platform over the water and worked at a specially suspended desk. With the upper level flooded, they could do pretty much everything together. On the seventh day, Peter would go back downstairs and spend some time with Pamela and Sissy, who were still living in the dolphin house. Lovett kept a log of her time with Peter through detailed recorded notes. They had language lessons twice a day, and he tried really hard to mimic her voice. M, she said, was a really tough one for Peter, but she was determined to teach him her name. He would roll onto his back and blow something resembling an M sound from out of his blowhole, and she took it as a success. But she said the language lessons weren't the most important thing they did. The most beneficial for Peter in learning to communicate, and for her in learning how to work with him, was just the downtime they spent hanging out. And they had a lot of downtime. Lovett said she got to know Peter as an individual, what interested him and what influenced his moods. She saw him become fascinated with her anatomy, or at least she interpreted his floating close to her legs as his understanding that she was different and a curiosity to know how legs worked. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, she recalled, he would come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked, and I was so charmed by it. With Peter in isolation, Andy Williamson, the vet, soon discovered another issue. Peter was a maturing male and developing sexual urges, and without other dolphins around, he sought out his only companion as an outlet, which was Lovett. He started rubbing himself on her, on her legs or on her hands. At first, she arranged to put him back down with the females when this happened so he could take care of himself. But his needs became so frequent and the process of moving him downstairs so intensive that she started resenting the disruption. It was standing in the way of their lessons, so she decided to relieve him manually. Speaking about it years later, Lovett said, I wasn't uncomfortable with it as long as it wasn't rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch. Just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that's how it seemed to work out. It wasn't private, people could observe it. And she said it wasn't sexual. On Peter's part, yes of course, but on her part it wasn't at all, though she did admit it was sensuous. I was there to get to know Peter, she said, and that was part of Peter. And of course, this is about the only part of the story anyone ever really talks about. Even Hustler wrote about Lovett and Peter's bizarre situation in the 1970s. But somehow, the story actually gets weirder from there. It wasn't just dolphin linguistic experiments that were arguably kinda nutty in the 1960s. The post-World War II slash early Cold War years were a little wild. There was a lot of new technology and money for research, and a lot of interest in exploiting even the fringest of interests to gain a leg up in the Cold War. One of these was psychoactive drugs. Most famously, the CIA explored LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, as part of the brain warfare program MKUltra. Researchers hoped the drug might be a useful tool in interrogations, and reports that the Soviets were also producing and testing with LSD spurred on the American program. But there were also scientists looking at somewhat more peaceful applications, for lack of a better term. Lilly was one of a handful of neuroscientists licensed by the United States government to use the drug to help mental patients and explore ways to expand human consciousness. Lilly started by testing on himself, aka taking LSD and researching its effects. Then he moved on to animal experiments and eyed the dolphins in his dolphin house, keen to see if it would open their minds and aid in their communications efforts. Lovett was dead set against giving LSD to Peter. She worried that it could hurt him and undo all the work she'd put in building their strong relationship. Lilly consented to spare Peter, but it was ultimately his lab and his animals, and he did inject both Pamela and Sissy with the drug. And it didn't do anything. Different species react to drugs differently, which is why it's not safe to give your pet human medicine or, say, a horse tranquilizer to a dog. Much to Lilly's frustration, dolphins didn't exhibit any change in their consciousness or communications efforts. Lilly's interest in LSD ultimately outgrew his interest in dolphin communication, and his willingness to inject the animals with drugs made him fairly unpopular in scientific circles. Lab director Gregory Bateson actually left the dolphin house over the LSD tests. He was so appalled that Lilly would treat his animals so poorly. Around the time Bateson left, Lilly opted to close the dolphin house. Between his waning interest and a lack of new funding, there was just no way to keep it open, which meant Lovett's time with Peter was at an end. He wasn't exactly an animal she could take home. Peter was moved to another one of Lilly's labs in Miami, but he didn't have the same air, sunlight, and freedom to move around that he'd had in St. Thomas. Peter's health deteriorated quite quickly, not from his environment, but from depression. Remember how dolphins are conscious breathers? Well, one day, a few weeks after the move, Peter opted to take a breath, sink in his tank, and not take another breath. Lovett felt the loss, but she also said it wasn't as painful for her as knowing that Peter was suffering in awful conditions. The dolphin study never got where Lilly had hoped, and he shifted from human-dolphin communication to dolphin-dolphin communication, which by then was a way better analog for aliens. Astronomers were realizing that before we could communicate with aliens, we would probably have to discern their own language and how they communicate with one another. As for Lovett, she stayed in the dolphin house. She ended up marrying the photographer who captured scenes of her and Peter. They converted the lab back into a livable home where they raised a family. That is going to do it for me for today. If you are a fan of very weird mid-century history, I'm happy to have you in this little corner of the internet. 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