Did John Lilly REALLY Talk to Dolphins?

I know that John Lilly claimed to be able to talk to them, but I’ve not heard of any respectable scientists agreeing with that. (For those of you not familiar with Lilly, see here.)

Given his predilection for mind altering substances he probably thought he was talking with them. Reading the website it’s the usual crank spew, ie “Ideas too revolutionary - powers that be against me - spaceship earth - humankind is destroying itself, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah”

Peer reviewed science to prove his hypothesis …ummm…no.

AFAIK, talking to dolphins is still more woo woo than anything else.
Newton’s Apple Teachers guide (and what could be more mainstream than that?) says about the same thing that most scientists have been saying for 30 years:

With regard to spaceship earth:

“Do be kind to your vegetable friends, You are the gardener of Earth garden.”

No, he didn’t talk to dolphins. He did some wacky stuff, though. As I recall, he had a woman live with a dolphin in a special habitat, including servicing the dolphin sexually, to see if they could establish some kind of rapport or something. The acid was pretty good back then.

I was actually involved in a groundbreaking research program to ‘talk’ to dolphins. At West Edmonton Mall we had a dolphin center with four dolphins, and I was hired by them to work with an animal behaviourist on a computerized system to talk to dolphins. I bought a (very expensive at the time) voice recognition board, plus a controller system that could be driven by a PC. We wired the dolphin tank with sensors, speakers, lights, and paddles that the dolphins could push to signal things. The idea was that the trainers could ‘talk’ to the dolphins through their headsets, and the speech would be converted into light signals by the computer. The dolphins could then press a series of paddle switches to ‘talk’ back, and the paddle output would be converted into light and audio signals that humans could interpret. Basically, it was an extension of the complex hand signals we used to communicate with the dolphins. There was some research at the time that suggested dolphins could learn different light and sound patterns and respond in complex ways, so we were going to test it out.

Part of it was show biz - the idea was to use the setup in the dolphin shows. But we were also trying to do serious research. The whole project was funded by Sperry computers - their plan was to use the project in their advertising: “If a Dolphin can use our computers, so can you!”

Then Sperry merged with Burroughs and became Unisys, and our project was de-funded. We never really got it off the ground. We lost funding while we were in the process of testing the hardware and shaking the bugs out of it.

But it was a lot of fun working with the dolphins. It was also fun because iwas able to SCUBA dive in the WEM water tanks after hours whenever we felt like it. It was really cool in there. Caves, lots of fish, sunken rowboats and other neat stuff.