Two anthropologists looking to reshape the world via consciousness expansion. Dosing dolphins at a research institute in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Lab visits from a not-yet-famous 29-year-old Carl Sagan. A psychedelic subculture among crews of TV shows in the ’60s, including Flipper. Benjamin Breen’s piece—an excerpt from his book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science—recounts an interesting period in the history of psychedelics and leaves you wanting to read more. (Signup required.)
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?
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.
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