In the 1930s, the married anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead had seen themselves as scientists seeking to expand the accepted limits of “normal” human behavior, communication, and consciousness. By the 1940s they came to believe that their project could help ensure the survival of humanity itself, threatened as it was by the spread of fascism and the advent of atomic warfare. They regarded both as a product of “pathogenic” cultural patterns — ideas that drive you insane.
By 1963 Bateson and Mead were divorced. But Bateson continued to see himself as pushing the boundaries of science to prevent feedback loops of conflict, which led him to the psychoanalyst John C. Lilly’s Communications Research Institute on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. By then Lilly’s professional résumé was impeccable: degrees from Caltech and Dartmouth, a stint teaching at Penn, previously the head of a government research lab at the NIH, and now running his own lavishly funded institute. Moreover, for reasons that remained somewhat mysterious, he had managed to persuade NASA to fund his efforts to teach dolphins how to speak English.
Though Bateson was never truly on board with Lilly’s project of teaching dolphins how to speak, he spoke vaguely but fervently of the institute’s work as somehow connected to his larger goal of healing a sick society through interdisciplinary science. “I hope from the dolphins we may learn a new analysis of the sorts of information which we need — and all mammals need — if we are to retain our sanity,” Bateson pronounced grandly to reporters at a fund-raising gala for the institute.
Anyone observing his daily work at the lab might have been surprised by such claims. The truth was, Bateson spent most of his time struggling to learn the basics of dolphin behavior. Each day, he carefully documented such activities as “genital stimulation” and “beak propulsion.” Diagrams of dolphin movements covered his desk; photographs of their underwater acrobatics hung in the darkroom. Bateson’s notebooks from this period resemble the work of a deranged football coach, with thousands of colorful loops, arrows, and dashes indicating movements in a pool that was perpetually clouding due to inadequate filtration.
And then there were the tapes — hundreds of reels of magnetic audio and Super 8 film. One surviving clip shows Lois Bateson, his third wife, with a dolphin named Sissy. Lois’s auburn hair tied in a bun, she looks apprehensive, as if suddenly aware of the enormous strength of the cetacean she is swimming beside. In another recording, a young CRI staffer named Margaret Howe can be heard struggling to teach a young male dolphin named Peter how to speak in human-sounding phonemes. Progress is slow. “ONE... TWO... THREE... FOUR... FIVE... SIX...,” Howe counts, only to be interrupted by a shriek from Peter that sounds more like a satellite signal than a human voice. “Now, now, Peter,” she chides gently.
The recordings were grist for Lilly’s mill. By 1963, he was absolutely convinced that his dolphins were uttering coherent words in English — but at a speed so rapid and a pitch so high that only computerized manipulation could make them understandable. The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense. After all, if he could bridge the barrier in communication between these two radically different species, how could Americans and Soviets continue to claim that communication between their own camps was impossible?
Six months into Bateson’s time at St. Thomas, a young Harvard assistant professor named Carl Sagan arrived for a tour. Not yet famous, but already a brilliant writer, the 29-year-old astronomer saw the visit as a tropical diversion from his research into the question of why Venus’s atmosphere was so blisteringly hot. But Sagan was also visiting in a semi-official capacity: He and Lilly belonged to the same secret society.
In 1961, Sagan helped plan one of the first conferences on extraterrestrial life. The organizers had sought not just scientists interested in first-contact scenarios but also someone who already spoke to “aliens” — or at least the closest parallel that Earth afforded. Lilly was the obvious choice. Afterward, Sagan founded a whimsical scientific fraternal organization, the Order of the Dolphin, that was partially inspired by Lilly’s work. Now, three years later, Sagan was finally visiting Lilly’s “aliens” in person.
Sagan’s first encounter at the Communications Research Institute was with a young male dolphin named Elvar. “We entered a medium-sized room at the far corner of which was a large polyethylene tank,” Sagan wrote. A dolphin was floating inside it, observing Sagan “with his head thrown back out of the water.”
“Carl, this is Elvar; Elvar, this is Carl,” Lilly said by way of introduction. Then, as Sagan recalled, “Elvar promptly slapped his head forward, down onto the water, producing a needle-beam spray of water that hit me directly on the forehead.”
“Well, I see you two are getting to know each other,” Lilly said, then left the room.
The dolphin rolled over to present his belly. Sagan rolled up his shirtsleeves and began scratching Elvar like a dog. The dolphin demanded more, then more again, until Sagan tired of the game. Elvar responded by leaping so high that “only high tail flukes were in contact with the water.” As he did so, he emitted a single shrill syllable. It sounded to Sagan as if he had shrieked, “More!”
Sagan “bounded out of the room” and excitedly announced the news to Lilly, who seemed entirely unsurprised. “Good, that’s one of the words he knows,” he replied.
Sagan was delighted by the trip. Afterward, however, he began to wonder about the quality of the research. Sagan and his close friend the astronomer Frank Drake were becoming experts in identifying signals amid seas of noise picked up by radio telescopes. They agreed that the institute’s work set off alarm bells. Lilly appeared to be cherry-picking his data, carefully selecting the snippets of “dolphinese” that resembled human language and excluding the rest.
The most unsettling feature of the institute, however, was not Lilly’s quixotic obsession with dolphin speech. It was the fact that his dolphins kept dying.
Among those who questioned Lilly’s actions at the lab was Ted Nelson, a young Harvard graduate who had first met Lilly on a train in New Jersey. Nelson was intrigued by the idea of studying animal communication with computers. And he adored Gregory Bateson, with whom he shared an office. But Lilly struck Nelson as needlessly callous. True, the institute’s director was “brilliant and persuasive, and a fantastic self-publicist,” Nelson admitted. Yet he was, at heart, “ruthless ... a con man.”
For a time, Nelson worked on a promotional video about the lab’s work. It was meant to be a puff piece, but Nelson found the job unexpectedly difficult. The trouble was, he wrote, that the tropical splendor of the lab’s setting kept swerving unexpectedly toward a more unsettling ambience:
Through the windows, it was just before twilight and beautiful: The palm trees were blowing, pelicans scudded by. Atmosphere. Then I panned the camera across the room, showing concern on everybody’s faces as they watched oscilloscope traces leaping. We were actually hearing what the scope showed: the shrieking and whistling of our dolphin pals in the tank on the floor below, coming out of different speakers as the sound was transposed from different audio ranges.
The truth was that Lilly’s research with animals relied on what scientists at the time called “operant conditioning” — a polite term for using pain to control animal behavior.
By the spring of 1964, an unlikely psychedelic subculture had emerged among a group of scuba divers, actors, and producers who worked on the television shows Sea Hunt (1958–61) and Flipper (1964–67). Their mentor was Oscar Janiger, a UCLA psychiatry professor and friend of Sidney Cohen, Aldous Huxley, and Betty Eisner. Janiger believed that psychedelics must be “institutionalized” in a “supervised context” — but he did not mean psychiatric institutions. Rather, the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Athens was his model, a secret rite involving a transcendent experience that occurred deep underground. It appealed to Janiger because it was supposedly open to all, but he also liked the theatricality of it.
The divers and producers associated with Sea Hunt and Flipper began using LSD. And so John Lilly, who consulted on both programs, found himself tripping for the first time in a Malibu beach house in early 1964. His guide was the actress Constance Tors, whose producer husband had hired him to consult on the film version of Flipper. While Tors looked on, Lilly injected 100 micrograms of LSD into the muscle of his thigh (for reasons he never fully explained, he did so while completely naked). As the drug kicked in, Lilly wrote that he “suddenly realized that all of my previous training leading up to this point, all of my preparation, had been worth it.” At the height of his trip, he stared at his face in a mirror for a long time. It seemed to him that his father’s face was suddenly overlaid onto his own — and then his father’s father’s, and his father’s, and so on. After two thousand or so generations, “suddenly the face of a hairy anthropoid appeared on my face.” A new kind of interspecies communion had been achieved.
While returning from Hawaii on a United Airlines flight on April 28, 1964, Lilly hatched a plan. “Dear Gregory,” he scrawled in schoolboy cursive on the airline’s complimentary stationery addressing Bateson, his associate director. “Did you ever do any serious research with LSD? Its effect on communication? On yourself? With music, noises, etc.? I’m getting some to try on a dolphin to see if it ‘forgets to breathe’ under its influence.”
He signed off with an invitation to join him: “I’m contemplating resuming the tank isolation work — are you interested? LSD in that milieu ought to push things very fast.”
Stopping back in Los Angeles en route to a conference in New York, Lilly then tripped for a second time with Constance Tors. The next day, he boarded a flight to New York City to present a paper on dolphins at a conference of acoustic scientists. And then, after delivering his speech, exiting the conference room, and hitting the button of a hotel elevator, Lilly collapsed.
By his own account, he awoke three days later in a hospital bed, entirely blind. Slowly an explanation came together. When he injected himself with LSD, Lilly believed, tiny bubbles in the detergent used to clean the hypodermic syringe had entered his bloodstream, “cutting off the circulation to very critical parts of my brain, including the visual cortex.” Lilly claimed he spent six weeks in recovery before returning to St. Thomas. By this time, news of the event was circulating throughout the scientific community — and, of course, among his employees. “The rumor went around that the episode had happened as a result of taking LSD,” Lilly explained ruefully. After all, “LSD was found in my briefcase in the hospital.”
Lilly resolved to extensively test the drug on the animals before he would try it again himself. But he was reassured about the risks, he wrote, when “the six dolphins tested apparently had very good trips.”
From that point onward, Lilly began habitually tripping on LSD in his deprivation tank, floating motionless for hours at a time while he practiced his dolphin-inspired breathing technique. At a stroke, the Communications Research Institute had become a drug research center.
This essay is adapted from Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, out earlier this year from Grand Central Publishing.
