April 18, 2025 • 26 mins
Okay... the title EXAGGERATES, but for real...in the 1960s, scientists on St. Thomas try to teach dolphins how to speak English. And one of the dolphins...well, he was too horned up to learn. LSD gets involved, too.
Watch the documentary The Girl Who Talked To Dolphins to get the whole scoop.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. I don't know if you guys can
ever hear this when I'm recording, but sometimes my cats
they eat so loudly that it bleeds into the recording
because they have callers and they have the little name
tag on the callers, and then that just like clanks
on the food bowl.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So often my life is.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Just the soundtrack of clank clank, clank clank. And yes,
I do feel like I'm going crazy, not just because.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Of that though. The thing about having pets, I love
my cats. They're great.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Also, they can be very annoying, but I have never
really had the desire to know exactly what they're thinking. Sure,
I like to look at their behavior be like, what
does that mean?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Do they need something? Do they want something?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Are they trying to take advantage of me?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Probably?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
But also I don't really want to know what their
inner monologue is, mostly because I'm afraid, right I'm afraid
that their inner monologue is please mother, let me out
of this prison that is your apartment. So perhaps because
of my own guilt, I don't want to know what
they're thinking, because what they're thinking is something really awful.
(01:27):
But also, most of the time they're just asleep. However,
not everyone is like me, and sometimes people want to
know what animals are thinking, what are they saying. In
the nineteen sixties, a scientist had a lab on Saint
Thomas and at that lab, he and his team we're
(01:49):
trying to communicate with dolphins.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
And while all the.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Scientists there, we're trying to make huge breakthroughs and inter
species communication. Unfortunately, what most people know about this lab
is that one of the research assistance got a little
bit sexy with one of the dolphins. Cue the theme song.
(02:19):
This is American filth and I'm Gabby Watts. Every week
I tell you a filthy story from American history. This
week's episode, scientists get hot and heavy with a dolphin, get.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
A oh wow? Do you guys like this music? This
album was.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Called Atmospheric See Life, so I thought it'd be appropriate
for today's episode. And yes, the title is a bit
of a misnomer, but we'll get to that. I have
to say something spicies so people listen to it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So in the nineteen sixties, an American neuroscientist named John
Lilly was going a bit cuckoo bananas. He was disillusioned
by the prevailing theories in science and suspected that we
could only uncover the truths of the world through other avenues.
Maybe a touch of mysticism, maybe a sprinkle of spirituality
(03:35):
would help us get closer to the truth. And yes,
you might already be thinking this, but Lily was really
into LSD. In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, a
lot of people were experimenting with LSD, including the government
(03:56):
murder agency the CIA. Also, the government was giving money
to scientists to study it to see what's up with it.
And Lily, well, he would take LSD and float around
in this isolation tank ruminating on scientific questions. One of
(04:18):
the ideas he came up with was I need to
figure out how to communicate with animals, and with that
he commenced a new chapter of his life's work, communication
with other species. And Lily wasn't looking at cats and dogs. No,
(04:41):
he specifically wanted to communicate with animals that had big brains.
Even more specifically, he was going to look at dolphins.
So John Lilly and his team set up shop on
Saint Thomas Island in the Caribbean. There he created a dolphinarium,
(05:07):
you know, an aquarium, But it's just dolphins, and he
acquired three of them, two females named Pamela and Sissy obviously,
and one male named Peter. These dolphins had been dolphin
actors in a show called Flipper. Yeah, that's right, three
(05:28):
celebrities in the dolphinarium. And you might be thinking, Okay,
so this random scientist, John Lilly wanted to figure out
how to communicate with dolphins.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Why does this matter?
Speaker 1 (05:48):
This seems like absolutely useless research.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Also, how the heck did he get funding? Well.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Over the course of his life he wrote something like
twenty books, and one of them was a huge hit.
It was called Man and Dolphin, and in it he
said that in his early observations of dolphin behavior, he
saw them mimicking human voices, as if they wanted to
say something to us. He was like, Yeah, if we
(06:20):
teach marine mammals how to speak English, they could become
a part of our society and broaden our perspectives as
narrow minded Homo sapiens. Dolphins are in the order Cetacea,
and Lily was like, we could even have a cetacean
chair at the United Nations. Wouldn't that be fun to
(06:44):
have a dolphin ambassador to think, guys, we could have
a dolphin at the Security Council meetings, being like, YEAHNT
Yahoo is a war criminal.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Interspecies communication wasn't just ex sighting for Lily. Other serious
scientists wanted there to be more research on this, specifically
scientists at NASA.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, NASA, the agency.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Responsible for aeronautics in space, not the sea and dolphins
gave Lily money.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Why well, they thought his work.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
On interspecies communication could shed light on intergalactic communication. You know, like,
if we ever encountered intelligent beings out there in space,
we need to figure out how to communicate with them.
And if Lily can learn how to communicate with dolphins,
well that's basically like communicating with an alien. Also, these
(07:53):
scientists weren't thinking this at the time, but it's important
for us to learn how to talk to dolphins because
when the aliens come, maybe the aliens are gonna want
to talk to the dolphins instead of humans. Aliens will
be like, wow, the humans ruined the planet. They are
clearly quite stupid. Let me talk to someone who understands
(08:13):
how to live within their environment.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
So Lily.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
He got that money from NASA to studied dolphin behavior.
But it wasn't Lily who came up with the experiment
that would lead to his lab's infamy. That was envisioned
by a young woman named Margaret hal love It. Love
(08:43):
It was an animal enthusiast and didn't have any formal
training as a scientist, but she was intrepid curious. She
was living on Saint Thomas when a relative told her
about a mysterious science research center on the island. I
love It was like, dang, I gotta go see what's
up with that. So she drove up to the facility
(09:05):
and was He's like, ooh, this is cool. Can I
please have a job, and John Lily he gave her one.
He found that she had an aptitude for communicating with animals,
you know, she was a real life Disney princess, so
he put her in charge of teaching English to the
dolphin trio. Belove It she was like, I don't know
(09:29):
if that's enough exposure. Were with them all day, then
we go home at night. Those night hours could be
key to teaching them how to communicate with us. So
Lovett proposed that she stay at the lab all the
time and get completely immersed in the dolphins' lives.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Lily thought this was a great idea.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
He was like, yes, young woman employee, I am open
to you working twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Not a problem with me.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
So the team at the Dolphin Areum converted the top
level of the lab into a shallow pool. This was
a floor above the main tank that was replenished daily
with sea water, and there was a freight elevator that
can move between the two levels, transporting the dolphins from
the tank to the lab. Love It and Lily decided
(10:25):
to focus on one dolphin for this immersion experience, and
who did they select? Peter, the young boy. Peter hadn't
received as many English lessons, so he was a fresh
start for the experiment, kind of a blank slate. Lovett
made herself a bed on the elevator rack that's suspended
(10:46):
above the pool. She also had a workstation where she
recorded observations on an audio tape and in writing and
Peter lived in the shallow pool. Love It and Peter
stayed in that room together twenty four hours a day,
six days a week.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
He was put back.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Into the main pool on Sundays and I don't know
if you guys are gonna believe this, but Peter became
fluent in English. He hated the beatnik writers of the
time that loved Jane Austen. His least favorite book was
Moby Dick because, in his words, wales are big, giant,
ugly plankton eating bottom feeding lugs.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Just kidding.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Peter didn't learn English at all.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Maybe if they had tried Portuguese or Dutch it would
have worked.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
But not English.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
During the experiment, love It observed Peter attempting to mimic
English sounds.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
He particularly struggled.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
With ims, and even though he could mimic, that didn't
mean he knew English. Making sounds and understanding language those
are two very different things. Love It and Peter were
in that room together for six months, and over the
course of the experience meant a huge issue arose, specifically
(12:11):
Peter's penis. Peter was a young adolescent dolphin, and you
guys know, boys will be boys, and boy dolphins will
also be boy dolphins. Peter was very, very, very horny,
and when a dolphin gets to randy, there's nothing that
(12:33):
can stop them from unhornying themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And so love.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
It came up with a bold, unethical, and gross way
to deal with that be right back after these soothing advertisements.
So dolphins are known as some of the horniest animals.
(13:00):
Scientists have said it's almost impossible to get in between
a dolphin and their pleasure. They do some pretty freaky stuff.
There were some scientists a couple of years ago who
observed some very odd behavior from some bottlenosed river dolphins.
What they saw was astonishing. There are two male dolphins
(13:20):
swimming around and in their mouths they were holding an anaconda.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Why the heck would they do that.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
The ecologists observing them were like, I mean, there's a
lot of different theories, but some of them thought it
was because the dolphins were using the anaconda as their
own dolphin pocket pussy, because the entire time that the
scientists were observing them, they had erect wieners. One marine
(13:49):
mammal scientist said it could have been sexually stimulating for them.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
It could have been something to rub on.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
The New York Times covered this story and said quote,
researchers who study dolphins are well aware of the animals.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Sexual proclivities, which.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Is rubbing their genitals on toys or inserting their penises
into objects. They often use their penises for tactile interactions.
One scientist has even observed male bottlenosed dolphins trying to
penetrate the blowhole of a rescued pilot whale in an aquarium.
It's possible that the males tried to insert their penises
(14:27):
into the snake. Don't you guys love nature? So yeah,
dolphins are horny and they'll use just about anything to
relieve themselves. So let's get back to the nineteen sixties.
(14:48):
Love It and Peter the dolphin. We're spending a lot
of time together in isolation. However, they would have to
interrupt that isolation whenever Peter got too horned up and
ready to go. In a documentary called The Girl Who
Talked to Dolphins, Lovett said, to be with me, he'd
rub himself on my knee or my foot, or my
(15:08):
hand or whatever.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
And I allowed that.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I wasn't uncomfortable with that as long as it wasn't
too rough. The problem was Peter was getting too rough,
And because Peter was so horny, he couldn't focus on
the lessons in front of him.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
He was too horny to learn how to speak English.
He needed relief.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So initially, what love It would do is she would
put him on the elevator and send him back down
to the tank that had the two female dolphins, and
there he'd do his business that he needed to do
with those ladies. He'd taptail, he'd knock flippers, he'd make waves,
you know what I'm saying. And then after he relieved himself,
(15:55):
she would put him back on the elevator and get
him back to their isolated chamber above. Peter, though, was
so young, so horny, that transporting him between the two
levels became unsustainable. Peter wanted to wank multiple times a day,
(16:16):
and if he didn't, he wasn't gonna pay attention.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
He was out of commission.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
There was no point in doing the experiment. So love
It came up with another solution. She took matters into
her own hands, literally, yes, to keep the experiment afloat.
Love It started pleasuring Peter's pecker.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Are you guys.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Enjoying all of these euphemisms? Love It said in that documentary,
it was very precious, very gentle. It was sexual on
his part, It was not sexual on mine. Sensuous. Perhaps
it became part of what was going on, like an itch,
scratch it and move on. I was there to get
(17:04):
to know Peter, and that was part of Peter. So yeah,
for me, a lot of alarm bells going off, a
lot of me being like, yuck, yuck, yuck. Yike's kind
of thinking, I don't know, I don't really have a
good nuanced thing to say about this. I think the
only way I can communicate it is in dolphin Beyond
(17:33):
the general moral implications of a human engaging in sexual
activities with an animal. One scientist in that documentary said
that he was concerned for Peter because Peter was developing
an intense bond with love It due to these Peter
Pecker sessions. Yeah, he was falling in love with a
human that's not gonna work out. And yeah, love It
(17:59):
was doing all of this and they weren't really getting
any scientific results. Ause John Lily was annoyed. He was like, well,
this living experiment isn't working. So he started doing something
else to try to communicate with dolphins.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
He started giving the dolphins LSD. Yeah, he was drugging them.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
He wanted to see if LSD had any effect on them.
And he was like if I give them the drug,
and if I take the drug, then maybe we could
communicate telepathically, if you can believe it.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That also didn't work. Also, the LSD.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Didn't even seem to affect the dolphins' behavior at all.
And if dolphins can't be chill and get high on LSD,
what's the point. Lily was losing interest. He didn't really
care about teaching dolphins English anymore, and the lab started
to fall apart. First of all, love It and the
(19:07):
other scientists didn't like Lily's treatment of the dolphins. They
were like, you shouldn't give them drugs, that's crazy. And
then the director of the lab quit and then the
lab lost its NASA funding, and love It quickly found
herself out of a job. Her final task with Lily
was to decommission the lab on Saint Thomas. Loved still
(19:32):
at a special bond with Peter, and Peter was obsessed
with love It, but unfortunately it's really hard to house
a dolphin, so she couldn't keep him on Saint Thomas.
Lily moved the dolphins to his lab in Miami. This
lab sucked comparatively. It was a converted bank building that's
(19:54):
smaller tanks than no sunlight, and Peter he didn't last long.
Peter committed suicide. In the documentary, dolphin activist Rick Oberry
said this, dolphins are not automatic air breathers like we are.
(20:15):
Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable,
the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to
the bottom. They don't take the next breath. This is
so depressing. And what they said in the documentary was
that Peter killed himself because he was so disoriented and
(20:36):
sad without love It. Yeah, this dolphin died of a
broken heart. Again, I don't know how to process my
feelings around this in English, so I'm just gonna say.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
It in Dolphin.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
After all this happened, the media got a hold of
the story, specifically the story that love It had jacked
off Peter the dolphin during the experiment. In the nineteen seventies,
Hustler magazine put out an article entitled Interspecies Sex, Humans
and Dolphins, and it made everyone look really bad, being like, hey,
(21:30):
you guys were having sex with these dolphins. And then
they were like, well, that's not exactly what happened, Margaret.
How Love It was a scientist. She never expressed any
remorse about what happened and the documentary she was just like, hey,
you know, we were doing science experiments. I was doing
(21:50):
what was good for science. It's whatever. It wasn't sex,
it's fine. And this is what she said about Peter
when she learned that he had died. I wasn't terribly
unhappy about it. I was more unhappy about him being
in those conditions at the Miami Lab than not being
at all. Nobody was going to bother Peter. He wasn't
(22:10):
going to hurt, he wasn't going.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
To be unhappy. He was just gone.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
And that was okay, odd, but that's how it was.
I feel like she should be more upset than that.
But whatever, I mean, I guess that proves that obviously
she wasn't in an emotional or sexual relationship with a dolphin.
She's like, yeah, he's dead, he's an animal. But I'm sad.
(22:41):
This is how sad I am. After she left the lab,
Lovett married the photographer who had documented her time with Peter.
The two of them ended up buying the dolphinarium and
converting it into their home. So I feel like she's
(23:03):
a little bit more upset about Peter dying than she's
letting on.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
She's like, I gotta go live where we spent our
time together.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
As for John Lilly, he started again even more cuckoo
bananas after the Dolphin experiments. One thing he proposed in
the nineteen seventies was the existence of three cosmic entities.
One was called the Earth Coincidence Control Office. Yeah, he
was like, there's no coincidences. They're just intergalactic beings that
(23:34):
control everything, and they have their own agents inside of
our government. Like this is what Lily wrote about the
former US Attorney General that man I see on television
is a direct agent of the extraterrestrial reality controlling all
human life. He is giving a public speech on television
to the human species in order to program them into
(23:57):
believing that he is not an extraterrestrial agent. In reality,
he is controlled by the solid state life forms of
the civilization of another place in our galaxy. It is
obvious that what he is saying is to hide.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
His real mission.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
And yes, if you can believe it, he came up
with that while he was on LSD and floating in
his isolation tank. He spent so much time floating in
that tank. It's as if he became the dolphin. Why
communicate with them when you are one. Every episode of
(24:41):
American Filth we learn a lesson, and the lesson we
learn here is that dolphins can't speak English, so maybe
we shouldn't try to teach them. Maybe instead we should
learn dolphin. You heard me speak it so well throughout
this episode, you can do it too. I'm gonna sy
(25:05):
send a message to Duo Lingo say hey, why don't
we have dolphin as one of the language options. So yeah,
if you guys have any contacts with Duo Lingo, let
me know and soon we'll all be speaking dolphin. Cue
the credits. American Filth is a production of School of
(25:31):
Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was hosted, written, and
produced by me Gabby Watts. Our theme song is by
Jesse Niswanger. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,
and Brandon Barr. You can follow along with the show
on Instagram at American Filth Pod. Also make sure you
leave a review, leave some stars, send this episode to
(25:52):
your friends, specifically to your friends who live under the sea.
They would love this episode, and of course always send
American filth episodes to your enemies anyway, I'll talk you
guys next time. Bye.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
School of Humans.
School of Humans. I don't know if you guys can
ever hear this when I'm recording, but sometimes my cats
they eat so loudly that it bleeds into the recording
because they have callers and they have the little name
tag on the callers, and then that just like clanks
on the food bowl.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So often my life is.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Just the soundtrack of clank clank, clank clank. And yes,
I do feel like I'm going crazy, not just because.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Of that though. The thing about having pets, I love
my cats. They're great.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Also, they can be very annoying, but I have never
really had the desire to know exactly what they're thinking. Sure,
I like to look at their behavior be like, what
does that mean?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Do they need something? Do they want something?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Are they trying to take advantage of me?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Probably?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
But also I don't really want to know what their
inner monologue is, mostly because I'm afraid, right I'm afraid
that their inner monologue is please mother, let me out
of this prison that is your apartment. So perhaps because
of my own guilt, I don't want to know what
they're thinking, because what they're thinking is something really awful.
(01:27):
But also, most of the time they're just asleep. However,
not everyone is like me, and sometimes people want to
know what animals are thinking, what are they saying. In
the nineteen sixties, a scientist had a lab on Saint
Thomas and at that lab, he and his team we're
(01:49):
trying to communicate with dolphins.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
And while all the.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Scientists there, we're trying to make huge breakthroughs and inter
species communication. Unfortunately, what most people know about this lab
is that one of the research assistance got a little
bit sexy with one of the dolphins. Cue the theme song.
(02:19):
This is American filth and I'm Gabby Watts. Every week
I tell you a filthy story from American history. This
week's episode, scientists get hot and heavy with a dolphin, get.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
A oh wow? Do you guys like this music? This
album was.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Called Atmospheric See Life, so I thought it'd be appropriate
for today's episode. And yes, the title is a bit
of a misnomer, but we'll get to that. I have
to say something spicies so people listen to it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So in the nineteen sixties, an American neuroscientist named John
Lilly was going a bit cuckoo bananas. He was disillusioned
by the prevailing theories in science and suspected that we
could only uncover the truths of the world through other avenues.
Maybe a touch of mysticism, maybe a sprinkle of spirituality
(03:35):
would help us get closer to the truth. And yes,
you might already be thinking this, but Lily was really
into LSD. In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, a
lot of people were experimenting with LSD, including the government
(03:56):
murder agency the CIA. Also, the government was giving money
to scientists to study it to see what's up with it.
And Lily, well, he would take LSD and float around
in this isolation tank ruminating on scientific questions. One of
(04:18):
the ideas he came up with was I need to
figure out how to communicate with animals, and with that
he commenced a new chapter of his life's work, communication
with other species. And Lily wasn't looking at cats and dogs. No,
(04:41):
he specifically wanted to communicate with animals that had big brains.
Even more specifically, he was going to look at dolphins.
So John Lilly and his team set up shop on
Saint Thomas Island in the Caribbean. There he created a dolphinarium,
(05:07):
you know, an aquarium, But it's just dolphins, and he
acquired three of them, two females named Pamela and Sissy obviously,
and one male named Peter. These dolphins had been dolphin
actors in a show called Flipper. Yeah, that's right, three
(05:28):
celebrities in the dolphinarium. And you might be thinking, Okay,
so this random scientist, John Lilly wanted to figure out
how to communicate with dolphins.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Why does this matter?
Speaker 1 (05:48):
This seems like absolutely useless research.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Also, how the heck did he get funding? Well.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Over the course of his life he wrote something like
twenty books, and one of them was a huge hit.
It was called Man and Dolphin, and in it he
said that in his early observations of dolphin behavior, he
saw them mimicking human voices, as if they wanted to
say something to us. He was like, Yeah, if we
(06:20):
teach marine mammals how to speak English, they could become
a part of our society and broaden our perspectives as
narrow minded Homo sapiens. Dolphins are in the order Cetacea,
and Lily was like, we could even have a cetacean
chair at the United Nations. Wouldn't that be fun to
(06:44):
have a dolphin ambassador to think, guys, we could have
a dolphin at the Security Council meetings, being like, YEAHNT
Yahoo is a war criminal.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Interspecies communication wasn't just ex sighting for Lily. Other serious
scientists wanted there to be more research on this, specifically
scientists at NASA.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, NASA, the agency.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Responsible for aeronautics in space, not the sea and dolphins
gave Lily money.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Why well, they thought his work.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
On interspecies communication could shed light on intergalactic communication. You know, like,
if we ever encountered intelligent beings out there in space,
we need to figure out how to communicate with them.
And if Lily can learn how to communicate with dolphins,
well that's basically like communicating with an alien. Also, these
(07:53):
scientists weren't thinking this at the time, but it's important
for us to learn how to talk to dolphins because
when the aliens come, maybe the aliens are gonna want
to talk to the dolphins instead of humans. Aliens will
be like, wow, the humans ruined the planet. They are
clearly quite stupid. Let me talk to someone who understands
(08:13):
how to live within their environment.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
So Lily.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
He got that money from NASA to studied dolphin behavior.
But it wasn't Lily who came up with the experiment
that would lead to his lab's infamy. That was envisioned
by a young woman named Margaret hal love It. Love
(08:43):
It was an animal enthusiast and didn't have any formal
training as a scientist, but she was intrepid curious. She
was living on Saint Thomas when a relative told her
about a mysterious science research center on the island. I
love It was like, dang, I gotta go see what's
up with that. So she drove up to the facility
(09:05):
and was He's like, ooh, this is cool. Can I
please have a job, and John Lily he gave her one.
He found that she had an aptitude for communicating with animals,
you know, she was a real life Disney princess, so
he put her in charge of teaching English to the
dolphin trio. Belove It she was like, I don't know
(09:29):
if that's enough exposure. Were with them all day, then
we go home at night. Those night hours could be
key to teaching them how to communicate with us. So
Lovett proposed that she stay at the lab all the
time and get completely immersed in the dolphins' lives.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Lily thought this was a great idea.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
He was like, yes, young woman employee, I am open
to you working twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Not a problem with me.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
So the team at the Dolphin Areum converted the top
level of the lab into a shallow pool. This was
a floor above the main tank that was replenished daily
with sea water, and there was a freight elevator that
can move between the two levels, transporting the dolphins from
the tank to the lab. Love It and Lily decided
(10:25):
to focus on one dolphin for this immersion experience, and
who did they select? Peter, the young boy. Peter hadn't
received as many English lessons, so he was a fresh
start for the experiment, kind of a blank slate. Lovett
made herself a bed on the elevator rack that's suspended
(10:46):
above the pool. She also had a workstation where she
recorded observations on an audio tape and in writing and
Peter lived in the shallow pool. Love It and Peter
stayed in that room together twenty four hours a day,
six days a week.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
He was put back.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Into the main pool on Sundays and I don't know
if you guys are gonna believe this, but Peter became
fluent in English. He hated the beatnik writers of the
time that loved Jane Austen. His least favorite book was
Moby Dick because, in his words, wales are big, giant,
ugly plankton eating bottom feeding lugs.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Just kidding.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Peter didn't learn English at all.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Maybe if they had tried Portuguese or Dutch it would
have worked.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
But not English.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
During the experiment, love It observed Peter attempting to mimic
English sounds.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
He particularly struggled.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
With ims, and even though he could mimic, that didn't
mean he knew English. Making sounds and understanding language those
are two very different things. Love It and Peter were
in that room together for six months, and over the
course of the experience meant a huge issue arose, specifically
(12:11):
Peter's penis. Peter was a young adolescent dolphin, and you
guys know, boys will be boys, and boy dolphins will
also be boy dolphins. Peter was very, very, very horny,
and when a dolphin gets to randy, there's nothing that
(12:33):
can stop them from unhornying themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And so love.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
It came up with a bold, unethical, and gross way
to deal with that be right back after these soothing advertisements.
So dolphins are known as some of the horniest animals.
(13:00):
Scientists have said it's almost impossible to get in between
a dolphin and their pleasure. They do some pretty freaky stuff.
There were some scientists a couple of years ago who
observed some very odd behavior from some bottlenosed river dolphins.
What they saw was astonishing. There are two male dolphins
(13:20):
swimming around and in their mouths they were holding an anaconda.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Why the heck would they do that.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
The ecologists observing them were like, I mean, there's a
lot of different theories, but some of them thought it
was because the dolphins were using the anaconda as their
own dolphin pocket pussy, because the entire time that the
scientists were observing them, they had erect wieners. One marine
(13:49):
mammal scientist said it could have been sexually stimulating for them.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
It could have been something to rub on.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
The New York Times covered this story and said quote,
researchers who study dolphins are well aware of the animals.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Sexual proclivities, which.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Is rubbing their genitals on toys or inserting their penises
into objects. They often use their penises for tactile interactions.
One scientist has even observed male bottlenosed dolphins trying to
penetrate the blowhole of a rescued pilot whale in an aquarium.
It's possible that the males tried to insert their penises
(14:27):
into the snake. Don't you guys love nature? So yeah,
dolphins are horny and they'll use just about anything to
relieve themselves. So let's get back to the nineteen sixties.
(14:48):
Love It and Peter the dolphin. We're spending a lot
of time together in isolation. However, they would have to
interrupt that isolation whenever Peter got too horned up and
ready to go. In a documentary called The Girl Who
Talked to Dolphins, Lovett said, to be with me, he'd
rub himself on my knee or my foot, or my
(15:08):
hand or whatever.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
And I allowed that.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I wasn't uncomfortable with that as long as it wasn't
too rough. The problem was Peter was getting too rough,
And because Peter was so horny, he couldn't focus on
the lessons in front of him.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
He was too horny to learn how to speak English.
He needed relief.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So initially, what love It would do is she would
put him on the elevator and send him back down
to the tank that had the two female dolphins, and
there he'd do his business that he needed to do
with those ladies. He'd taptail, he'd knock flippers, he'd make waves,
you know what I'm saying. And then after he relieved himself,
(15:55):
she would put him back on the elevator and get
him back to their isolated chamber above. Peter, though, was
so young, so horny, that transporting him between the two
levels became unsustainable. Peter wanted to wank multiple times a day,
(16:16):
and if he didn't, he wasn't gonna pay attention.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
He was out of commission.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
There was no point in doing the experiment. So love
It came up with another solution. She took matters into
her own hands, literally, yes, to keep the experiment afloat.
Love It started pleasuring Peter's pecker.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Are you guys.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Enjoying all of these euphemisms? Love It said in that documentary,
it was very precious, very gentle. It was sexual on
his part, It was not sexual on mine. Sensuous. Perhaps
it became part of what was going on, like an itch,
scratch it and move on. I was there to get
(17:04):
to know Peter, and that was part of Peter. So yeah,
for me, a lot of alarm bells going off, a
lot of me being like, yuck, yuck, yuck. Yike's kind
of thinking, I don't know, I don't really have a
good nuanced thing to say about this. I think the
only way I can communicate it is in dolphin Beyond
(17:33):
the general moral implications of a human engaging in sexual
activities with an animal. One scientist in that documentary said
that he was concerned for Peter because Peter was developing
an intense bond with love It due to these Peter
Pecker sessions. Yeah, he was falling in love with a
human that's not gonna work out. And yeah, love It
(17:59):
was doing all of this and they weren't really getting
any scientific results. Ause John Lily was annoyed. He was like, well,
this living experiment isn't working. So he started doing something
else to try to communicate with dolphins.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
He started giving the dolphins LSD. Yeah, he was drugging them.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
He wanted to see if LSD had any effect on them.
And he was like if I give them the drug,
and if I take the drug, then maybe we could
communicate telepathically, if you can believe it.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That also didn't work. Also, the LSD.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Didn't even seem to affect the dolphins' behavior at all.
And if dolphins can't be chill and get high on LSD,
what's the point. Lily was losing interest. He didn't really
care about teaching dolphins English anymore, and the lab started
to fall apart. First of all, love It and the
(19:07):
other scientists didn't like Lily's treatment of the dolphins. They
were like, you shouldn't give them drugs, that's crazy. And
then the director of the lab quit and then the
lab lost its NASA funding, and love It quickly found
herself out of a job. Her final task with Lily
was to decommission the lab on Saint Thomas. Loved still
(19:32):
at a special bond with Peter, and Peter was obsessed
with love It, but unfortunately it's really hard to house
a dolphin, so she couldn't keep him on Saint Thomas.
Lily moved the dolphins to his lab in Miami. This
lab sucked comparatively. It was a converted bank building that's
(19:54):
smaller tanks than no sunlight, and Peter he didn't last long.
Peter committed suicide. In the documentary, dolphin activist Rick Oberry
said this, dolphins are not automatic air breathers like we are.
(20:15):
Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable,
the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to
the bottom. They don't take the next breath. This is
so depressing. And what they said in the documentary was
that Peter killed himself because he was so disoriented and
(20:36):
sad without love It. Yeah, this dolphin died of a
broken heart. Again, I don't know how to process my
feelings around this in English, so I'm just gonna say.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
It in Dolphin.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
After all this happened, the media got a hold of
the story, specifically the story that love It had jacked
off Peter the dolphin during the experiment. In the nineteen seventies,
Hustler magazine put out an article entitled Interspecies Sex, Humans
and Dolphins, and it made everyone look really bad, being like, hey,
(21:30):
you guys were having sex with these dolphins. And then
they were like, well, that's not exactly what happened, Margaret.
How Love It was a scientist. She never expressed any
remorse about what happened and the documentary she was just like, hey,
you know, we were doing science experiments. I was doing
(21:50):
what was good for science. It's whatever. It wasn't sex,
it's fine. And this is what she said about Peter
when she learned that he had died. I wasn't terribly
unhappy about it. I was more unhappy about him being
in those conditions at the Miami Lab than not being
at all. Nobody was going to bother Peter. He wasn't
(22:10):
going to hurt, he wasn't going.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
To be unhappy. He was just gone.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
And that was okay, odd, but that's how it was.
I feel like she should be more upset than that.
But whatever, I mean, I guess that proves that obviously
she wasn't in an emotional or sexual relationship with a dolphin.
She's like, yeah, he's dead, he's an animal. But I'm sad.
(22:41):
This is how sad I am. After she left the lab,
Lovett married the photographer who had documented her time with Peter.
The two of them ended up buying the dolphinarium and
converting it into their home. So I feel like she's
(23:03):
a little bit more upset about Peter dying than she's
letting on.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
She's like, I gotta go live where we spent our
time together.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
As for John Lilly, he started again even more cuckoo
bananas after the Dolphin experiments. One thing he proposed in
the nineteen seventies was the existence of three cosmic entities.
One was called the Earth Coincidence Control Office. Yeah, he
was like, there's no coincidences. They're just intergalactic beings that
(23:34):
control everything, and they have their own agents inside of
our government. Like this is what Lily wrote about the
former US Attorney General that man I see on television
is a direct agent of the extraterrestrial reality controlling all
human life. He is giving a public speech on television
to the human species in order to program them into
(23:57):
believing that he is not an extraterrestrial agent. In reality,
he is controlled by the solid state life forms of
the civilization of another place in our galaxy. It is
obvious that what he is saying is to hide.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
His real mission.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
And yes, if you can believe it, he came up
with that while he was on LSD and floating in
his isolation tank. He spent so much time floating in
that tank. It's as if he became the dolphin. Why
communicate with them when you are one. Every episode of
(24:41):
American Filth we learn a lesson, and the lesson we
learn here is that dolphins can't speak English, so maybe
we shouldn't try to teach them. Maybe instead we should
learn dolphin. You heard me speak it so well throughout
this episode, you can do it too. I'm gonna sy
(25:05):
send a message to Duo Lingo say hey, why don't
we have dolphin as one of the language options. So yeah,
if you guys have any contacts with Duo Lingo, let
me know and soon we'll all be speaking dolphin. Cue
the credits. American Filth is a production of School of
(25:31):
Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was hosted, written, and
produced by me Gabby Watts. Our theme song is by
Jesse Niswanger. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,
and Brandon Barr. You can follow along with the show
on Instagram at American Filth Pod. Also make sure you
leave a review, leave some stars, send this episode to
(25:52):
your friends, specifically to your friends who live under the sea.
They would love this episode, and of course always send
American filth episodes to your enemies anyway, I'll talk you
guys next time. Bye.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
School of Humans.
Host
Gabbie Watts
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