Voices in the Ocean Read online

  In one of the files I found a research proposal Lilly had written to the National Science Foundation, dated June 1978. It was an impressive thing, bulky with charts and graphs and diagrams outlining how new computer equipment could be used to “bridge the communication gap” between humans and dolphins. But the effort was futile: by this point, Lilly had been excommunicated from science. His fascination with dolphins and his conviction that their brains held untold secrets was stronger than ever, but his ability to get government grant money was not.

  Only a few of his former colleagues stayed in touch, Ken Norris among them. “I think many of your early insights are important, and I don’t intend to ignore them,” Norris wrote to Lilly, dodging the question of Lilly’s later insights, which included statements like “There are times when I feel that each dolphin may be more mentally healthy than the human beings to whom he is exposed.” Norris was delicate in his assessment of Lilly’s methods: “It’s a fine line to draw between imagining and believing. I love to imagine, but belief comes pretty hard with these animals. It’s so hard to obtain a decent fact.”

  “Your letter is a breath of fresh air in the midst of stale cave air,” Lilly replied, referring to the attacks from other dolphin researchers. The war drums had grown louder after the publication of Lilly’s second book, The Mind of the Dolphin, which contained Margaret Howe’s notes and an uncensored account of that experiment, and another book titled The Center of the Cyclone, about his—and the dolphins’—LSD experiences. It’s hard to imagine how Lilly could have expected anything other than wild controversy in the wake of all this, but reading through his correspondence it’s clear the antipathy distressed him. One critic, Lilly complained to Norris, had a “vast area of ignorance and a talent for diatribe against matters he cannot possibly understand.” Of another, Lilly said, “his obvious lack of experience with dolphins hardly qualifies him as an authority on dolphins.” In every line of the letter you can feel Lilly’s frustration, and even his pain. “Maybe I take it too personally,” he wrote. “I wish it didn’t hurt so much.”

  At the same time, however, Lilly had never been more influential in the public eye. His message that dolphins were unusually clever creatures resonated with people, who were just becoming aware of these animals; his willingness to explore the fringes of consciousness made him a counterculture hero. In 1972, the United States passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, a sweeping federal law inspired, at least in part, by Lilly’s pronouncements about dolphin and whale intelligence. In 1973, Mike Nichols directed a movie called The Day of the Dolphin, a science fiction thriller based on CRI’s work, with George C. Scott playing Dr. Jake Terrell, a character modeled after Lilly. Meanwhile, in Malibu that same year, Lilly passed out in his hot tub after a ketamine trip, nearly drowning himself. Throughout 1974, Lilly was taking so many hallucinogens that he had trouble discerning reality from illusion, confusion that landed him briefly in a psychiatric ward and then, later that year, in a short coma. His book Simulations of God: The Science of Belief came out in 1977; in it he described himself as an “extraterrestrial who has come to this planet Earth to inhabit a human body.” Unfortunately, he added, “the vehicle is too small to contain the passenger.” In 1979, the movie Altered States, based on Lilly’s adventures in his isolation tank, went into production with William Hurt starring. It was an interesting decade.

  Also in the seventies, biologist Roger Payne introduced the world to the astonishing songs of humpback whales: intricate, keening calls that echoed through the oceans, containing messages we could only dimly guess at. Up in British Columbia, another scientist, Paul Spong, was investigating orcas, and had come to the same conclusions as Lilly: “My work now is concerned with trying to reveal—or even just glimpse—a new kind of intelligence, something humans aren’t even aware of.” Spong’s study subjects loved music (particularly flute and violin), lived in tight family groups, and possessed a number of startling traits, including a sense of humor. Like their bottlenose and humpback brethren, Spong discovered, orcas communicated with a wide repertoire of sounds: “echolocation clicks, burst-tones, pure tones, whistles, hornblows, frequency-modulated screams, and sounds that I cannot really find any human words for.”

  As our understanding of the ocean grew, the idea of it as a wondrous parallel universe came along too. Anything was possible: we knew so little. We didn’t know, for instance, that octopi had long-term memories, or that great white sharks could be a little shy. We had no idea that penguins could fly underwater at twenty-five miles per hour. No one knew much about the lives of cantankerous pilot whales or extreme-diving belugas or any of their kin. Dolphins specialized in mystery, and Lilly was an enthusiastic explorer in the realm of the unknown. It was the place he loved most, in fact.

  It was appropriate, therefore, that Lilly’s return to dolphin research was funded by curious individuals rather than government institutions, and that the Human/Dolphin Foundation’s board included celebrities like Jeff Bridges and John Denver. Lilly’s aim this time around was pretty much the same as it had been last time: to talk to dolphins. But now, in 1979, technology had advanced. Lilly planned to use the fast new Apple II computer to generate a third language that both humans and dolphins could understand, a code based on the dolphins’ own clicks and whistles. He named this project Janus, after the two-faced Roman god of gateways. (It was also the less romantic acronym for “Joint Analog Numerical Understanding System.”) A private patron donated $10,000 to get Janus rolling; Lilly used it to buy two bottlenose dolphins, Joe and Rosie.

  In general, budgets were tight. In file after file I read evidence of financial angst: people complaining about lack of reimbursements from petty cash, scuffles over sums as small as $10.89, voluminous correspondence about how to coax General Motors into donating a van. Writing to one prospective donor, Lilly laid it out straight: “For $7,000/month for 5 months we can obtain the critical answers to the major question: are we able to get a dolphin to learn/select a computer useable code?”

  I wish I could tell you that this story had a perfect ending, with Lilly finding his grail and dolphins revealing all through a miraculous interface powered by the Apple II. Instead, the project dissolved in an acid bath of staff squabbling, cash shortages, vicious jealousies, and all-around dysfunction. There was a freewheeling quality to Janus’s operations, perhaps because the dolphins and staff were located in Redwood City, up near San Francisco, while Lilly and Toni resided in Malibu. Reading through old memos and records, I had the impression of a high-school class running amok when its teacher left the room. I came across meeting minutes that reported: “The issue of sexual relationships among staff members was discussed at some length, including specification of potential advantages…” Someone was accused of “spending too much time on personal vendettas.” One manager wrote a memo that said, “I have been harsh, at times picky, and generally merciless in this mud-slinging. And I own that.” Documents indicated there had been a staff walkout over pay, and a full mutiny against a particular engineer. Project Janus also included many volunteers, one of whom wrote a letter to Lilly complaining that, “while we have been quarrelling and mucking about in the petty mire of human egos and self motivations, the realization of someday communicating with another species on our planet remains no closer a reality…perhaps it is best that Cetaceans never come to fully trust man.”

  For three years, Janus’s software and hardware was fiddled with and tweaked, code rewritten and machines recalibrated, but the dolphins had not broken through. Joe and Rosie had learned only a few phrases; the one word they both picked up unequivocally was “fish.”

  The burned-out Lillys retreated to Esalen to consider a plan. I was riveted by the transcript of their visit, during which they consulted with a woman named Jenny O’Connor, a channeler of entities known as “the Nine,” who introduced themselves as extraterrestrials from the star Sirius B, here to help guide mankind. “I’m totally worn out. Totally worn out,” Lilly told them. “Bec
ause I’ve been trundling around raising money, and being the scientist in doing the work the way I think it ought to be done, and fighting with other scientists who think it ought to be done in another way, and all this shit.” The project, he complained, was “getting dull.” Toni agreed: “My fantasy is…of being in the tropics, with warm water, being able to play with the dolphins, just any way—I don’t care how scientific it is.”

  Through O’Connor, the Nine recommended that Lilly simply disappear from view. His legend would be assured, they said, if he suddenly went AWOL, rather than wrangling with Janus any longer: “Mankind likes the hero that rides off into the sunset.”

  Perhaps Lilly considered this, but what he did instead was trudge along with the project while Toni tried to relocate it to more idyllic surroundings. The file box also contained a mock-up brochure for a new “interspecies resort” in Costa Careyes, Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta. The development would include a hotel and spa, a research facility, and a bay in which people and dolphins could “ultimately meld their relationship.” The dolphins themselves would be free to come and go, with no enticements except for live music, played from a floating raft. Guests would be issued a backpack-like device called a “Dolphin Talker” so they could communicate with wild dolphins “as soon as it has been established that this is feasible.” Janus would carry on its work with Joe and Rosie south of the border.

  Reading through this material, I was struck by Lilly’s persistence. Despite the fallout from CRI, the unappealing experiences of Margaret Howe, and the inertia of Janus, the man truly, deeply believed that humans and dolphins belonged together, and that we could learn to speak one another’s language. Though Lilly’s Mexican dolphin resort would not come to be, his vision, however embattled or far-fetched, remained.

  Lilly lived to see the new millennium, but Toni did not. She died of bone cancer in 1986. Neither years nor heartbreak made Lilly any softer about the human race; if anything, his opinion of mankind grew gloomier. “If I were from an older, greatly superior culture from some other place in the vast universe, I would recommend that this planet be shunned,” he wrote. “The human species is so arrogant that it doesn’t recognize its own superiors. The only way that humans in the mass will respect any other species, apparently, is the ability to beat them in warfare.”

  From what I’d read of Lilly’s writings, from what I knew of his life, I suspected that he was drawn to dolphins for the same reason he liked to take drugs and retreat into his isolation tank: as an escape from human society. Working as a scientist during World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, Lilly had a front row seat to the havoc people can get up to, the low road we often seem to travel: “The whole philosophy that says that the one species must rule the other species has been cast out of the thinking of myself and my colleagues,” he reflected. “We are often asked, ‘If the dolphins are so intelligent, why aren’t they ruling the world?’ My very considered answer is this—they may be too wise to try to rule the world.”

  Although he couldn’t prove them, Lilly’s ideas about dolphin communication were hardly dead ends. Since his initial explorations, other scientists have had great success barking up this same tree. In the Bahamas, biologist Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project, has created a portable underwater device that sounds a lot like Lilly’s Dolphin Talker, except that Herzing’s seems to work. She uses pattern recognition software to translate dolphin sounds into English, swimming with a pod of spotted dolphins on the Bahama Banks. Recently, science journals reported that one of Herzing’s study dolphins had whistled the code for “sargassum,” a type of seaweed the researchers had been using as a toy.

  During the last decade of his life Lilly lived on Maui, surrounded by the inhabitants of what he called the “Cetacean Nation.” The spinners, the spotteds, the bottlenoses, the orcas, the humpbacks, every species of dolphin and whale—they were all tribes that belonged to the same huge clan, one that Lilly believed deserved at least some of the same rights we had. He became an antiwhaling advocate, attending International Whaling Commission meetings and traveling often to Japan. As an old man, Lilly had the restive eyes of his younger days, and a mane of white hair. He would often sit for hours and stare out to sea.

  It was as though Lilly knew he would be judged, and where his priorities lay: “A certain willingness to face censure, to be a maverick, to question one’s beliefs, to revise them, are obviously necessary,” he wrote. “But what is not obvious is how to prepare one’s own mind to receive the transmissions from the far side of the protective transparent wall separating each of us from the dark gulf of the unknown. Maybe we must realize that we are still babies in the universe, taking steps never before taken. Sometimes we reach out from our aloneness for someone else who may or may not exist. But at least we reach out, and it is gratifying to see our dolphins reach also, however primitively. They reach toward those of us who are willing to reach toward them.”

  If you wanted to swim with a dolphin at Ocean World Adventure Park, a facility billed by its owners as “the most advanced marine interaction park of its kind,” you would first have to travel to the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean country about twice the size of New Hampshire. Though it adjoins poverty-stricken, earthquake-ravaged Haiti, the Dominican Republic is a lively place, buzzing with movement and merengue music. Driving west from the Puerto Plata airport is like being plunged into a pinball machine, motorbikes and lorries and mini-cars streaking past hot pink casitas and tangerine bodegas and canary-yellow tiendas in a blur. After a few miles of crowds and chaos the road mellows out and the tourist suburbs emerge, with their cheap stucco and bougainvillea. They spill along the coast in clumps of time-shares that all look the same, but one landmark is hard to miss: the thirty-foot cement-and-neon dolphin at Ocean World’s entrance.

  Inside, beyond a fortress of gates and past the diesel fumes of a bus-unloading zone, accompanied always by jaunty music played at startling volume, you would face decisions. You would have to decide if you wanted to purchase the Royal Dolphin Swim ($199 for sixty minutes in the water with dolphins), or the Dolphin Swim ($169 for thirty minutes), or perhaps the Dolphin Encounter (a $109 wading opportunity for nonswimmers), or if you were feeling flush, the immersive $250 Trainer for a Day experience. Regardless of which of these options you selected, you would then need to determine if you wanted to add on a sea lion encounter ($79), or a shark and stingray encounter ($79), or perhaps both. That is, unless you were pregnant, in which case you may not do any of the above.

  I stood in the ticket line, looking at mounted posters of people posing with the creatures that lived inside these gates, including a pair of Bengal tigers in a faux stone grotto, caged behind a sheet of plexiglass. (In photographs the plexiglass is invisible, creating the illusion that the visitors are bravely facing off with the tigers.) The photo nearest to me featured a woman in a bikini gripping a dolphin by his pectoral fins; the end of the dolphin’s beak was scraped off and raw pink. In another picture, a grinning man in a lifejacket kneeled in the water with a dolphin on either side of him, their beaks nuzzling his cheeks.

  Ocean World is a place that encourages touching. At other marine parks, patrons must be content to sit in the bleachers and watch dolphins doing choreographed tricks; here they can pay to become part of the show. “The dolphins are trained to interact with each person regardless of his or her size, shape, gender, or abilities,” the park’s Web site reassures. Depending on which packages they purchase, visitors might ride a dolphin by latching onto its dorsal fin, or be kissed on the mouth by a dolphin, or have a dolphin pretend to dance with them. They might be licked on the head by a sea lion, or pet a stingray with its stinger removed, or stroke a nurse shark’s sandpapery skin. For anyone uninterested in that, there is also a dolphin-themed casino and discotheque overlooking a marina with its own customs-and-immigration facility.

  On the day I stopped by, it was the doldrums of winter and I expected to see flocks of sunshine-seeking tourists
streaming through Ocean World’s gates, but the place was not crowded. I walked in and paused for a moment to get my bearings: Ocean World occupies a big swath of seafront. There was a brimming gift store situated directly in front of the entrance and exit, across from a kiosk where people could buy photos and videos of themselves with the animals, taken by Ocean World photographers. At the front of the gift store a display overflowed with stuffed dolphins and tigers.

  The last time I had visited a marine park was in the late 1960s, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when I was four or five years old. Coincidentally, its name had also been Ocean World. In my misty childhood memory it was an exotic place, filled with creatures I’d never imagined, like hammerhead sharks, alligators, and—I was from Canada—parrots. There were dolphins there too, and when they weren’t performing their dolphin show the public could fondle and feed them, dropping minnowy little fish into their mouths. Though it was an artifact of an unslick era, Ocean World Fort Lauderdale kept its doors open until 1994. It finally closed after being charged with animal abuse by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Among other violations, it was cited for cramming its dolphins into tiny overchlorinated pools, inadequate veterinary care, dumping sewage into the Seminole River, and “the improper burial of dolphins in the park’s landscaping.” One time, management had attempted to paint the inside of the dolphin tank without first removing the dolphins. The park also lost a lawsuit brought by a visitor, Ernest Coralluzzo from the Bronx, New York, who was bitten by a bottlenose while standing next to the petting pool. Coralluzzo charged that the dolphin, Dimples, lunged at him without provocation, causing nerve damage to his left arm. During the trial, it came out that Dimples was a repeat offender, having bitten at least six other people and walloped several more with his tail. Despite having treated the dolphin abysmally, the president of Ocean World defended him in the press: “It was an accident…Dimples is part of our family.”