Original subtitles

In the Caribbean,

on the shore of one

of the American Virgin Islands,

sits a strange, crumbling building.

It's a monument to perhaps the most remarkable period

in the history of animal science.

In the 1960s, a group of researchers came here to study dolphins.

Dolphins have been here 65 million years.

We're just getting out of the trees. They know more than we do.

Inspired by new discoveries about the animal mind,

the researchers believed they could, for the first time,

communicate with another species, by teaching dolphins to speak.

Why not?

That's what I kept saying.

Let's do this.

- Hello. - Ah-oh.

Speak English only, Peter.

Their work had extraordinary ambition.

Scientists believed if they could talk to dolphins,

they could even talk to extra-terrestrials.

Are we alone in the universe?

Are there other creatures out there that we might get to know?

It wasn't science fiction.

It was... "Wow, this is where we're going."

But what started with '60s idealism

would spiral into the darkness of the decade,

and end in tragedy.

"The worst experiment in the world,"

I've read somewhere, was me and Peter.

Until now,

those involved have never spoken publicly about the experiment.

But 50 years on, they've broken their silence

to reveal just what happened within these walls.

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Communication is what defines us as humans.

We're a social species, which wants to talk to others,

and not just other people.

It's long been a human dream to be able to talk to the animals.

Do this, Vicky.

THEY BLOW AIR

Early experiments in the 20th century involved

trying to teach the great apes sign language,

and even how to speak English.

Another sound resembles the letter K.

Vicky. Sit up, girl. Come on. Do this.

THEY MAKE SOUNDS

Vicky has to hold her hand over her nose.

But by the end of the 1950s, there had been no real progress

and serious scientific attempts to talk to the animals

ground to a halt.

There was one person, however, who hadn't given up.

His name was John Lilly.

John Lilly was a scientist, a visionary

and, uh, maybe above all, an explorer.

Explorer of the brain, the mind.

Lilly's a fascinating character.

He was a super smart,

physics-oriented, Caltech grad,

who during the Second World War,

ends up working in an aviation physiology laboratory,

doing experimental work on American pilots, monitoring data

about heart rates and respiration.

And then subsequently, as his research life develops,

increasingly interested in animals.

By the late '50s, Lilly was a respected brain-scientist

working for the American National Institute Of Mental Health.

If one believes that they not only

have the brain to learn it, but the ears...

His area of expertise was what brains of animals

could tell us about our own.

His wife, Mary, worked with him.

He was always interested in brains.

And he would find out what areas of the brains did what,

that sort of thing.

But it's easier to work on other species than humans.

And there was one species whose brain fascinated Lilly

above all others...

..an animal which human beings believed was one of the cleverest

and most ancient creatures on Earth -

the bottlenose dolphin, also often called the porpoise.

So, they've been here, you know, 25 million years.

We haven't been here that long.

We've only been here with our present brain size

about two tenths of a million years.

This is a big brain.

This is a bigger brain than we're accustomed to working on.

In fact, it's a bigger brain than a human brain!

Lilly needed access to the dolphins' super-sized brains.

And he found it in Florida.

Leaping three feet out of the water

and through a hoop is only one of the accomplishments of Flippy,

the pride of the studios at Marine Land Florida.

Flippy gets a big kick out of demonstrating his high IQ.

Marine Studios in Florida

is one of the first institutions in the post-war period to keep

a bottlenose dolphin in captivity.

Lilly makes his way down there in order to have access to

some of these animals for experimental purposes.

Lilly began doing brain experiments on the dolphins

and recording their reactions.

One day, in 1957, this research triggered a behaviour that

would change the course of his life.

The first to spot it was Mary.

Whilst John and his team were working nearby,

she noticed something they'd missed.

I came in.

I heard John talking and the porpoise would go

"Awawawawawa," like John.

Chee-chee. Chee-chee. More, more. Fish.

And then I realised it was hearing their voices and imitating them.

And I went down to where they were operating

and told them that this was going on, and they were quite startled.

More, more fish.

DOLPHIN SQUEAKS

Lilly was convinced the dolphin was imitating the humans,

trying to speak to them.

If he was right, it would be one

of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.

For the rest of his career, Lilly would write about and talk about

that moment in 1957, where it all popped open for him.

He thinks that this indicates ambition on their part

to communicate with the beings around them that are human.

A breakthrough of not just scientific, but potentially

even world historic significance -

humans were being displaced from their position

atop the cosmos of intelligent creatures.

We were not alone.

DOLPHIN SQUEAKS

"And now... here's Jack."

Lilly believed his mimicking dolphins would revolutionise

the science of animal communication.

For the first time, here was another species which seemed to be

trying to make contact with us.

And in 1961, he published a book revealing his findings.

John, what was the prediction in your book that caused such comment?

I predicted that, within a decade or two,

the human species would establish communication

with another species.

This is a scientist.

This isn't some, you know, nut that I've brought out here!

- This man knows... He may be a little nutty, I don't know. - Thank you(!)

But he's a real, acknowledged scientist.

Now, roll this film and you're going to see some interesting things.

These are some of the sounds they make.

What in the main do you think dolphins talk among each other?

Oh. Food, sex and danger.

Sounds like Westport, Connecticut, to me, there.

That's it, forward. Come on.

Come on.

That's it.

Lilly's talking dolphins captured the public's imagination.

But for one group of people, his work had special significance.

'OK, it is in.'

'Ignition.'

'Blast off!'

In the early '60s, America was in the midst of a space-race...

..launching satellites and spacecraft to the Moon and planets.

'That's as far as we go for EDA.

'OK, they're free from EDA from here. Ready for decompression.'

And surprisingly, Lilly's ideas chimed with this new space age.

They'd caught the eye of a team of American astronomers

who were searching for extra-terrestrial life.

They were led by Frank Drake.

It was a very exciting book

because it had these new ideas -

particularly the idea that there could be creatures

as intelligent and sophisticated

in their thinking as us,

and yet living in a far different milieu.

Drake and his team were part of an official, government-funded

project to use radio telescopes to listen for signals from other

intelligent life in the galaxy.

For them, Lilly's work was potentially groundbreaking.

The possible intelligence of dolphins was of special interest to me

and the others who were interested in extraterrestrial intelligent life

because we wanted to understand as much as we could about

what the challenges were going to be in communicating

with other intelligent species.

There might be other civilisations in space attempting to send us

messages.

The detection of extraterrestrial signals

are going to be one of the most exciting things

that ever happened.

Here was perhaps an example of another intelligent species,

very different from us -

its vocal system was very different, its means of communicating

any information was different.

It would tell us what was important,

what we should specialise in,

what we should learn as much as we can about

if we were to understand extraterrestrial intelligent life.

'Four, three, two...

'All engines ready.'

Lilly realised the astronomers' interest opened up an opportunity.

America's space programme was extremely well-funded through NASA.

Here was his chance to get funding for a whole new phase of research.

Lilly brilliantly pitches the space administration

on the idea that they need

a model organism

upon which to experiment

for the prospect of an encounter with aliens.

NASA backed Lilly with many thousands of dollars.

And with financial support from other government agencies

like the US Navy,

he commissioned the lab of his dreams.

At St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, stands a unique laboratory...

In 1961, Lilly built a white, modern villa right on the shore

of St Thomas', one of the American Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.

This was the Dolphin House.

Here, a thousand miles from the American mainland,

he would now focus on research into human communication with dolphins.

Lilly had discovered that dolphins become quickly responsive

to human companions.

In daily playtime, they develop intense friendships,

often prefer people to other dolphins...

But Lilly would need a team to help him carry out the work.

Lilly was charismatic,

and he attracted some brilliant and hardworking people.

He recruits a very significant figure - Gregory Bateson,

an anthropologist - who rounds out his team for thinking

big about these animals.

Gregory Bateson was an intellectual giant of his time.

He had explored subjects like linguistics

and human anthropology at Cambridge and Sydney Universities.

Now he was looking for an opportunity to study

animal behaviour.

I worked as an anthropologist.

I looked around and I was clear

I didn't want to live in a lab.

Gregory had been doing

behavioural work - not only with humans but with

otters. And we had in our house 17 octopuses.

And we were studying their personal relationships.

Which was interesting.

Bateson's area of interest wasn't humans communicating with

animals, but rather how animals communicated with each other.

But in 1963, he was persuaded by Lilly to move his family out

to St Thomas' - including his 11-year-old stepson.

My Dad was much more interested in

the interaction between the dolphins.

Looking at the posture of pectoral fins - I mean,

does this mean something? Or the...uh, the alignment

of two animals swimming together,

is this sexual or is this just friendship

or is this just waiting to be fed?

The house was built over a single outdoor pool

where the dolphins would live.

Linked to the sea, it was cleaned by the tide.

Lilly's new lab offered the best conditions

possible for the animals in captivity.

And a window would allow Bateson to observe the creatures underwater.

I actually thought it was fantastic.

I mean, the water was absolutely crystal. That was neat.

I mean, it was just... It was all new. It was exotic.

That's the best word I can say for it.

The island's vet was also enlisted to ensure

the wellbeing of Lilly's dolphins.

Dr Lilly called me.

And he put me through an interview.

His concern was the health of his animals.

He wanted to be sure that I could relate

to the dolphins by putting me in the water with them.

And then, early in 1964, the lab had a visitor.

Margaret Howe was an attractive, 22-year-old college dropout

who had come to St Thomas' in search of adventure.

She'd heard rumours about a strange house at the end of the island

which had dolphins.

I was curious and I drove out and found signs saying, "Keep Out."

It was pretty isolated.

And I said, "Well, I heard you had dolphins here and I thought I'd come

"and see if there's anything I can do or if there's any way I could help."

Gregory Bateson sat me at the top of this spiral staircase,

where you could just look down and he said, "Just sit here

"and write what you think is happening, what you see."

You begin to think...

There's things going on other than just the prettiness of it all.

One of them is in front. One is in the back.

One is above. One is below.

One jumped. The other one went ahead.

And after an hour, I figured that out and started writing that.

Gregory Bateson said, "I like the way you wrote that.

"You think well on your feet."

He said, "You're able to see things.

"You can come here any time you want.

"We can't pay you, but you can come here.

"Would you like to do that?"

"Yes," I said.

"Yes, thank you! I will come back here any time."

So I did.

Margaret Howe rounded off Lilly's human team.

But it was the dolphins that everyone was there to study.

Lilly brought them from Marine Studios in Miami.

Before coming to the Virgin Islands, they'd also been used in filming

the movie Flipper.

There were three animals at the VI lab.

Peter, Pamela and Sissy.

Sissy was the biggest one.

She was pushy, loud.

Sort of ran the show.

So I had... Most of my relationship was with Sissy.

Very social.

Pam, she wouldn't come near anybody.

It took a full year before I was able to get close enough to her

to stroke her.

You are drawn to an animal who is shy and a little fearful.

It makes you feel good when they will come

and you can help them over that.

And that was Pamela.

And then there was one male dolphin.

Peter was an immature male. I don't think he was fully mature.

He was different.

He was definitely a young guy.

Sexually coming of age, I'm sure, and

liked Sissy. And Sissy was always having to... Bip!

She'd... Bip! Flip him off like that.

And that's who they were.

By February, 1964, the lab was in full operation.

Lilly was often away travelling, publicising his work or

raising funds, so left much of the research to the others.

He charged Margaret with picking up the mimicry work

where he'd left off.

It was her job to encourage the dolphins to copy the specific

sounds of human speech.

They can click and squeak and whistle

and do all the dolphin noises, and there are many.

But this human-like sound, humanoid they call it, not underwater,

in the air, and through the blowhole.

The blow hole, where they force air out of the lungs,

and the lips on the blow hole, actually open and closing,

and they can talk that way, if you want to call it talking.

Margaret began to focus on one of the dolphins in particular -

the male.

I really chose to work with Peter

because he'd not had any human-like sound training.

The other two had.

My first goal was to get him to listen while I speak.

And then I would listen while he speaks and we would set up this

conversation-type thing where we could make some sort of progress.

Today is January 27th. The time is 09.00 hours.

PETER CLICKS

Much of the work in the Dolphin House was captured on tape,

and these are the real sound recordings of Margaret's lessons.

A, E, I, O.

PETER SQUEAKS

But from the start, Peter was a reluctant pupil.

Speak for fish.

Don't squirt.

He would listen to me.

And I would say, "No, no, no, no, Peter.

"What I want you to do is count to three.

"You're going to say one, two, three,"

and Peter wouldn't repeat everything I told him,

he would work on the "eh, oh, eeyr..."

HE SQUEAKS

Listen. One, two, three.

HE WARBLES

You can do better, Peter.

Yeah, we had a few disagreements on things.

He could slap his tail.

You know when a dolphin is annoyed.

"One, two, three, I've already done that. I..."

"One, two, three, I told you I've...

"I'm going to do it one more time. One, two, three, and now that's it."

And he'd disappear.

HE SQUEAKS LOUDLY

The mimicry work seemed to have stalled.

But then Margaret had an idea.

It was very ambitious.

Every night we would all get in our cars and pull the garage door down

and click it and everybody would drive away.

And I thought, "Well, there's this big brain,

"three big brains floating around all night.

"What's really going on?"

And it amazed me that everyone kept leaving.

And I said, "That's craziness."

I said, "I will stay and I will do this."

And Lilly said, "What's that?"

I said, "I want to plaster everything

"and fill this place with water.

"I want to live here with Peter."

And Lilly got very excited.

And he went for it.

Margaret drew up radical plans for the house.

She began completely redesigning the layout of the upstairs rooms,

altering their shape

and making them waterproof.

The building had not been built to flood.

And we're gonna flood the place comfortably - knee deep,

a little bit deeper.

I didn't want to just be indoors for so long, so the balcony as well.

We flooded it and it kept leaking, so we had to drain it all

and plaster it up again. It took a while.

They had a giant elevator.

You'd get the animal on the elevator with a sling under it.

That's how the animal got up and down.

Margaret had created a domestic dolphinarium,

where she and Peter could live together

in a semi-aquatic environment.

I had a desk hanging from the ceiling, a telephone,

and a little stove I could make tea.

I was on a foam cushion and Peter would sleep next to me,

and he would sleep as long as I did.

And I lived there day and night.

And it was perfect.

And so, Margaret's extraordinary experiment began.

Over the coming months, she would live with Peter

in the Dolphin House almost full-time.

Margaret would immerse him completely in her world

to try to teach him English, like a mother teaching a child to speak.

One, two, three, four.

These are the audio recordings she made.

Today is...

HE SQUEAKS August 18th.

This is the morning lesson with Peter.

Hello.

HE WARBLES

No. Hello.

HE WARBLES

Clearly, Peter.

HE WARBLES PARTLY UNDERWATER

What's all the bluh-bluh-bluh-bluh? Come on!

I didn't talk to Peter the way I talk to you.

I...

I spoke in single words usually

and made inflection, something that he could follow.

That they were very good at.

The enunciation was not good.

But if I said, "One, two, THREE."

I...I wouldn't get one, two, three,

but I would get, "Wah, urwah, REHR."

One, two, THREE.

Ehr, ehr, ehr.

Good boy.

Hard as Peter tried,

there were still some anatomical restrictions

that limited his speech.

"M" is very difficult.

My name, you know, "Hello, Margaret," I worked on.

And M is just impossible,

but he eventually rolled over so that it kind of... "Bwah..."

He would bubble it into the water.

Mmmm...

Margaret.

Ahee-aaheeee.

Oh, he just couldn't get it right!

And he just would try and he would try. God!

To help with Peter's pronunciation,

Margaret wanted to draw his attention to the movement

of her mouth and lips.

His blowhole and my mouth

sort of were trying to do the same thing,

I actually put a white make-up -

thick white and black around my mouth -

so that when I was talking to him

or teaching a word,

he could really see my blowhole, as it were,

and I would...

really use my mouth, with this make-up on it,

and his eye was in air looking at my mouth,

I mean, no question about it. He wanted to know,

"Where is that noise coming from? What is that sound?"

Fish in buck-et.

HE SQUEAKS

During his visits back to the Dolphin House,

Lilly was delighted by Margaret's progress.

I feel armed with a kind of knowledge...

..that we could never have obtained...

..except through these experiments.

This must be supported

and enthusiastically encouraged.

He was very enthusiastic about it. We were very together.

I felt very supported and encouraged to do more.

But not everyone was as enthusiastic about Margaret's experiments.

Whilst the Batesons were happy to swim with the dolphins,

they weren't keen to teach them English.

Lois' husband, Gregory, doubted its scientific merit.

He felt his research on dolphin-to-dolphin communication

in the sea pool downstairs was of more value

than Margaret's work with Peter.

We liked Margaret.

She was certainly trying to see

if they could be trained to speak English

SHE CHUCKLES

Which was an ambitious plan.

It was interesting, but, you know, it wasn't...

It wasn't our cup of tea.

Despite the Bateson's doubts, Margaret persevered.

She began using Peter's curiosity and playfulness to keep him

interested in the lessons.

Whatever I brought to him,

whether it was me or an object

or just my time or my voice,

he was interested in that.

Uh, and that's very appealing.

Whether it was a ball or a toy or a square shape or whatever

I was interested in, he would have to turn to that.

And he did.

He loved to look at different shapes and...

and different sets of things and little toys.

Let's go through all our toys, Peter.

- Ball. - Baaah-ba.

Good.

Oblong.

- Ah-aaaaah. - Good!

Triangle.

Ah-ah-ah.

Oh, nice, Peter! Beautiful!

We just hit it off. We had that connection.

We were a team and it...it just worked.

SATELLITE SOUNDS

Margaret's progress with Peter also intrigued the astronomers.

They wanted to know whether the experiment to talk to another

species was producing results.

In the summer of 1965, they dispatched the famous

astronomer, Carl Sagan.

It's possible,

but by no means certain that life on many of these planets

evolves into beings

which are as advanced as we, or more advanced.

Carl, I think, was into anything that had anything to do with

trying to speak to anything alien.

Dolphins, they're another species, in a different environment

and in that regard, I think, the space people were interested.

- Hello. - Ah-oh.

Oh! I like it, I like it, I like it, Peter!

Good boy.

It was clear to Sagan

and the astronomers that despite Margaret's progress,

Peter was a long way from being able to understand and use English.

So instead of teaching the dolphins a human language,

like the Batesons, they suggested Lilly try to find out

how dolphins communicate with each other.

A prime experiment we suggested to him

was to reveal just how complicated a message

one dolphin could communicate with another dolphin.

And so we would suggest to have two dolphins,

one in each tank of water, separately,

not able to see each other,

but to be able to hear any phonations - one to the other -

and that he should teach one dolphin

some procedure by which it could

obtain food

and then see if it could tell the other dolphin

how to do the same thing in its tank.

This was a prime experiment to be done,

but he was never able to do it.

Ball.

Instead, Lilly instructed Margaret to continue her lessons with Peter.

Ball.

Ball.

Ball.

- Eh-ho. - No.

Ball.

- Ahll. - That's it! Yes!

Now you're getting there.

His vocalisation got better.

It was never clear, uh,

but it had control and it had tone

and it had space between the words.

The effort was there and that's what impressed me.

Ahll.

SHE CLAPS You're a good boy, yes, you are!

Thank you, Peter.

Margaret's lessons with Peter upstairs in the flooded house

ran for six days a week.

But on their day off,

they would join the others downstairs in the sea pool for fun.

One day, Andy Williamson brought his dog, Suki, to the house,

an encounter they captured on film.

Suki came into The Dolphin House,

the door was open into the pool.

And she saw me in the water.

And next thing I knew,

she took a little flying leap right into the pool.

And Andy and I are just shocked! And we thought, "Oh, my God!"

Peter passed her a couple of times and rubbed against her.

And Suki went crazy.

She was quivering. Her little ears were going like this,

she was just... And Andy was holding her.

Peter came up and stuck his beak right up,

made a couple of squeaks or clicking sounds.

And Suki went off Andy's shoulder.

Dachshunds, the way they are built with short little legs,

I mean, she kind of sank a bit.

Started paddling around.

The dog was having fun and the dolphins were having fun,

they were all having a party.

Life went on at the Dolphin House.

But back on the mainland, Lilly's interests were shifting.

MUSIC: "Eight Miles High" by The Byrds

It was the mid-1960s

and a new mind-altering drug had been invented - LSD.

# Eight miles high

# And when you touch down

# You'll find that it's stranger

# Than known

# Signs in... #

Brain scientist Lilly became obsessed by how humans

reacted to it.

And he began experimenting on himself,

convinced that it offered exciting new opportunities

to explore the mind.

There was one time where he said,

"All right, I'm going to go up and inject the LSD."

And I said, "Whoa!

"I will have nothing to do with that.

"And I will stay out of that, and you stay out of my business,"

which was dolphins.

I could see the difference in John Lilly.

He went from being, you know, a guy with a tie and a white coat

and a scientist in his laboratory to

a full blown hippie after a while.

He was a real explorer of those drugs that

expand our consciousness, you know.

I don't know there were too many

people with his...his expertise

and his scientific background that was doing that kind of work.

John's self-experimentation with LSD was becoming a concern for Margaret.

But something else was affecting her work with Peter.

They have sexual urges.

I'm sure Peter had plenty of thoughts along those lines.

Peter liked to be...with me.

He would rub himself on my knee or my foot or my hand or...

whatever, and I allowed that. I wasn't uncomfortable with that,

as long as it wasn't too rough.

Peter had caused Margaret some

minor injuries on her legs and stuff

of pushing like an obsessed suitor.

In the beginning, when he would get rambunctious and had this need,

I would put him on the elevator and say,

"You go play with the girls for a day."

HE SQUEAKS

But as Peter's urges grew more frequent,

the process of transporting him down to the two female dolphins

to satisfy him proved disruptive.

And Margaret felt the best way of focusing his mind

back on the lessons, was to relieve his desires herself manually.

It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen.

It was very, uh, precious.

It was very gentle.

Peter was right there.

He knew that I was right there.

Again, it was sexual on his part, it was not sexual on mine.

Sensuous perhaps.

It had just become part of what was going on.

Like an itch, you just get rid of that.

"We'll scratch it and we'll be done, move on."

And that's really all it was.

I was there to get to know Peter, that was part of Peter.

It was great that she wasn't going to be damaged by that,

but, as a veterinarian,

I wondered about poor Peter.

This dolphin was madly in love with her.

Margaret.

Ahee-aaheeee.

Margaret and Peter's relationship was continuing to deepen.

But with his ringside seat at the Dolphin House,

anthropologist Gregory Bateson was now seriously questioning

the value of Lilly's work.

My dad had, I think,

a pretty firm and clear view that this was a kind of circus trick.

For Bateson, Peter was simply copying Margaret's sounds

with no real comprehension of what he was saying.

I can't see why anybody in their right mind would think...

..they were going to be able to teach or learn to speak

in some common language.

You're not demonstrating anything about an animal's capacity

for language by getting them to master some part of your language.

You want to find out whether they have language,

you want to find out what they have for their language.

Come right out with the English, Peter.

Don't even think in your own language.

English all the time.

- Margaret. - Ah-ah.

Better. Thank you, Peter.

Like Gregory Bateson, Lilly's funders were also having

doubts about the value of the work.

And from 1965, in the absence of more impressive results,

they were starting to pull out.

Any of the work with dolphins was very difficult -

time consuming, expensive -

and at that time, John was not adequately financed

to really conduct the experiments that needed to be done.

As funding for the Dolphin House looked increasingly shaky,

Lilly was becoming desperate for results to impress his backers.

He turned to the one experiment he had so far resisted.

Why wouldn't you go ahead and use this very powerful drug

that has been used to facilitate psychotherapy,

namely LSD?

Take a little bit yourself so you're a little more open

to the alien world of the other and...

and heck while you're at it,

give a little bit to the dolphin so that they're a little bit more

kind of open to the communicative world of the other themselves.

Lilly hoped that giving the dolphins LSD would have a dramatic effect.

In a note to Gregory Bateson, he even wondered

if it might cause the animals to stop breathing.

LSD's a pretty powerful, psychedelic drug,

and I had no idea how the dolphins would react to that.

I mean, humans didn't always react to it very well, so, you know...

Despite these uncertainties about the consequences,

Lilly became obsessed with giving LSD to the dolphins.

My first thought was, "Not Peter."

I just said, "Not Peter."

What was I? 24 or something.

And it was his stuff, it was his animals, it was his pool.

I can't stop him.

Lilly coerced Margaret into being an assistant to his LSD experiment

on the dolphins.

And he pulled back and he said, "OK, not Peter."

We pulled Peter out of the sea pool where they were.

So Pam and Sissy were in the sea pool.

And John did inject them with LSD.

- LILLY: - 10:06pm.

Different species react in different ways.

Playing with pharmaceuticals is tricky business to say the least.

We didn't know what was going to happen.

And we certainly weren't prepared for anything to happen.

The dolphins were circling,

and John occasionally glanced

and said, "Oh, well, it's only been ten minutes."

And nothing was going on and it's been, well, 20 minutes now.

Nothing was going on, nothing, nothing, nothing happened, period.

Lilly was desperate to provoke a response.

He came up with a bizarre and cruel idea,

which shows how far he'd now come from genuine scientific research.

Dolphins have extraordinarily sensitive hearing,

using sound waves to sense their environment.

Could he use that to trigger a reaction?

And then John disappeared, and he went to the other side

and he picked up a jackhammer.

Jackhammer makes a big "thunk" going through the earth

and the cement and the rock and...

And he just started jackhammering,

which had everything sort of shaking.

And still nothing happened.

So that was sort of the end of it.

It just confirmed for me that John Lilly and I,

we were...we're very different.

For Gregory Bateson,

Lilly's use of LSD on the dolphins was the last straw.

He packed up the family and left.

St Thomas was really an impossible place to work.

And I actually don't think he felt like he made much progress

that year in St Thomas.

We had learned as much as we could from that particular setting

in St Thomas

and we just felt it was time to go.

With the Batesons gone and funding turned off,

by the summer of 1966, Lilly was running up large debts.

And in his LSD-fuelled world,

his attention was drifting away.

He lost focus on it,

and the drug culture and the LSD took his interest away.

It did fall apart at the end.

Badly.

The Dolphin House would have to close.

But decommissioning it would not be easy.

When you're dealing with live subjects,

whether they're rats or monkeys or dolphins,

what do you do with them after...

..after the experiments are over?

There was nothing we could do about it.

Lilly decided the dolphins would be transported to the US mainland,

to live in another private lab he ran outside Miami.

It would be the end of Margaret and Peter's relationship.

He wasn't mine. I couldn't keep him.

We couldn't elope, you know.

We couldn't rush off into the sea and disappear and hide.

You just can't do that.

It's a very expensive business, having a dolphin.

If he'd been a cat or a dog, I could have made a deal and kept him,

but, uh... How do you do that?

After months of living almost continuously with Peter,

the experiment was over.

It was time for Margaret to say goodbye.

I went back to the lab and spent the evening

and the night with Peter.

Being in the water with him, and just that sweetness.

It was very special and privileged.

Somebody who really wants you to be there

and sometimes is just comforted by the fact that you are there.

That was misty-eyed, because at that point, I knew...

..and Peter didn't know,

but I knew that that was the end.

In October 1966, the dolphins were loaded into travelling tanks

to be flown to Lilly's lab on the mainland.

Seeing that plane take off and circle - I didn't go with them -

that was emotional.

Margaret and Andy believed the animals had gone to a good home.

I was told that they were shipped some place where

they would be very happy.

I was told he arrived healthy, that they had him checked by a vet.

In reality,

this is the building outside Miami where the dolphins were moved to.

THEY SQUEAL

With little or no natural light and tiny, cramped tanks,

this nightmarish room was a very different environment

to the Dolphin House.

Lilly's friend Ric O'Barry remembers once visiting the labs.

It was awful, to be frank. It was awful.

The first thing that hit you... Bff! ..was that smell.

Dolphins urinate and defecate

three to five times the quantity people will,

so you can imagine the stench of having dolphins

inside of that small room,

in a plastic, portable swimming pool.

And the chlorine... Copper sulphate, chlorine, heavily chlorinated...

Yeah, it was awful. It was awful.

THEY SQUEAL

Back at the Dolphin House, Margaret was oblivious

to the conditions the dolphins were now being kept in.

Weeks passed, and then Margaret received a phone call about Peter.

I got that phone call.

From John Lilly.

John called me himself to...to tell me.

And he said he committed suicide.

Suicide.

And I use that word with some trepidation,

at the risk of sounding anthropomorphic, but

it does describe what is indeed self-induced asphyxiation.

They're not automatic air breathers like we are.

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 that next breath.

The shock of being moved from the Dolphin House had been too much.

Peter, it seems, had died of a broken heart.

You could think that Margaret could rationalise it,

but when she left, could Peter?

Here's the love of his life, gone.

50 years of ocean and storms have taken their toll

on the Dolphin House.

RECORDING OF MARGARET: I must eat my fish.

Today, this derelict shell is all that remains of the building which

housed the strangest experiment in the history of animal science.

The ruins of the Dolphin House...

It's easy to see, in that brokenness,

the...pathetic brokenness

of Lilly's own extraordinary ambition.

Boy.

PETER CLICKS AND SQUEAKS

Lovely!

People who study language aren't really persuaded

that his claims about dolphin talking

are really informed by the best work

in the study of language itself.

Instead, today's leading animal language experts believe what

happened at the Dolphin House was in reality a sophisticated

mimicry experiment.

Listen.

Fish in Buck-et.

Your parrot says, "Polly want a cracker,"

and you give that parrot a cracker,

have you broken through to an alien species?

Fish in Buck-et.

- Ah-ah-ah! - Yes!

Peter could copy Margaret's sounds

and relate them to objects and people.

What he couldn't do was use the words to communicate

spontaneously back to her.

He listens to me so well!

Listen.

Margaret.

Margaret.

Margaret.

Ah-aaaaah.

Listen, listen.

For Margaret, this was simply because the experiment

was stopped too early.

She believes Peter's progress was far more advanced than

a human infant's would have been after the same coaching.

And with more time,

she feels she would have taken his communication to the next level.

Six months.

You have a six-month-old baby, they're doing that? No.

You're talking to them all the time, sleeping with them,

hugging them, cuddling them, Are they doing that? No.

It's nothing. But people are impatient.

Do more, do more.

Despite the failure of the Dolphin House,

throughout the '70s and '80s,

Lilly's desire to communicate with dolphins continued.

Some of his research was bizarrely mystical,

like this attempt to try to contact them telepathically.

HE PLAYS THE KEYBOARD

Lilly was based in California,

and other experiments attracted high-profile celebrity interest.

We have this wonderful opportunity to explore communicating with

this species that lives

on our planet

with brains larger than ours.

Jeff Bridges was introduced to Lilly by Hollywood friends.

He became fascinated by his work trying to teach dolphins

to communicate using electronic sounds.

He was interested in trying to

teach humans a way

that would be easier for the dolphins to communicate.

And not so much trying to get the dolphins to speak humaneeze,

but giving the dolphins a code

rather than trying to make the dolphins speak like humans.

But Lilly's approach was completely at odds with other scientific

research into animal communication.

The failure of the Dolphin House killed off

serious scientific interest in teaching animals a human language.

Instead, over the following decades,

scientists have focused on trying to understand

animal-to-animal communication,

as Gregory Bateson and the astronomers had championed.

50 years after the Dolphin House,

it's not Peter's command of English

which the experiment is remembered for,

but Margaret's sexual encounters with him.

When an account of what happened was finally published in the 1970s,

it fascinated a prurient public.

And someone came up and said, "Well, aren't you just...?"

I didn't know what they were talking about.

I, first of all, had never even heard of Hustler Magazine.

And I opened the Hustler...

SHE GASPS And I found this story

with my name and Peter,

and a drawing of the sexual activity.

"The worst experiment in the world," I've read, was me and Peter.

I was very upset.

I never hid it from anybody.

There were people around, John Lilly sometimes.

Maybe somebody visiting with John Lilly.

Peter would be aroused and we would go through this.

But it always had to be respected.

Tarnished by the reputation of his work at the Dolphin House, Lilly

continued his use of mind-expanding drugs in the years which followed.

And he began championing many of the wilder ideas

from the counter-culture, becoming a new-age guru and cult figure.

With me is Dr John C Lilly.

What is true in the province of the mind?

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true

either is true or becomes true within certain limits.

But as he got older, Lilly's appreciation of dolphin

intelligence got him thinking about the animals differently.

Up to that point, I think he was

very involved in what dolphins

can do for me, John Lilly, the scientist.

And something happened along the way where he understood,

"They have just as much rights as we do

"and let's start thinking about what we can do for them."

John changed his thinking about the dolphins,

and he felt uncomfortable about keeping them confined -

and he ended up releasing his dolphins.

That's the first time that happened in America, or anywhere.

The first permit ever issued to release dolphins.

I had no right to confine them,

to imprison them,

to work on them.

My only right would be to work with them

in their natural habitat, in their natural state.

In the mid-1980s, Lilly began campaigning

relentlessly against holding dolphins captive.

This, together with the profile his work had given dolphins,

helped transform the way they were viewed by the public.

Congress passed the US Marine Mammal Protection Act.

And for organisations like Greenpeace,

they became an iconic symbol of the wider conservation movement.

That story of the rising campaign to afford new protections

to the world's marine mammals,

I would argue it's impossible to imagine that work without

Lilly's legacy.

John Lilly died in hospital in 2001, after a short illness,

at the age of 86.

Margaret Howe had stayed on in St Thomas' and married

the photographer who had taken the pictures of her with Peter.

Remarkably, she and her husband continued living in the house

for another ten years,

converting it into a family home and bringing up three girls.

It was a good place,

there was good feeling in that building all the time.

But for Margaret, today the house has an even more powerful memory.

That relationship of having to be together,

that sort of turned into really enjoying being together,

and wanting to be together, and missing when you weren't there.

I'm a human, I'm in love with a human.

I married a human, I had babies.

I did have a very close encounter with...

I can't even say a dolphin again, ..with Peter, one dolphin.

I was very lucky.

PETER SQUEAKS

HE SQUEAKS

SHE GIGGLES

That's amazing!

For the first time in 50 years,

Margaret has been able to hear recordings of her with Peter.

Trying so hard! God...

'One, two, three, four, five.

'Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

'Nice five, Peter.'

Nice five, Peter!

SHE LAUGHS AND CLAPS

PETER SQUEAKS

MARGARET: What is that all about, Peter?