Dolphin Frequency

Laurie Anderson sings: “John Lily—the guy who says he can talk to dolphins—said he was in an aquarium talking to a whale who was swimming around & around in a tank. And the whale kept asking him questions, telepathically. And one of the questions the whale kept asking was ‘Do all oceans have walls?'”

Lily came close, but not close enough.

In the 1950s, the government asked John C. Lily to study the dolphin brain. They gave him 5 dolphins to examine. Lily wasn’t aware dolphins had a voluntary breathing system, and in his first experiment he put two of the dolphins under anesthesia. They both died. However, he was able to revive one of the dolphins after it had not breathed for 10 minutes. Then, strangely, he put the half-brain dead animal back in the water to “see if it was still able to swim.” It couldn’t, the dolphin dropped to the bottom of the pool. So he decided to scratch the whole experiment of studying the living brain and instead killed all 5 dolphins to get “good brain specimens”. This story comes from Lily’s book Communication Between Man & Dolphin. At the end of the story, Lily came to the conclusion about how strange it was that dolphins have all the power & equipment to hurt a human, but never do even when provoked.

Lily is famous for teaching his dolphins to speak English. It was only a few one-syllable words. Vowels, no consonants. The dolphin would use their blowholes as vocal chords & the words would come out in a high-pitched cartoon voice. After awhile, Lily stopped teaching the dolphins to speak. He felt it was unnatural & cruel to force a dolphin to act like a human.

For 20 years he studied the dolphins in his Caribbean facility. Then suddenly one day, he ran from room to room, turning over tables, firing his staff, & shouting, “I quit!” He went down to the man-made lagoon and released his dolphins to the wild Atlantic ocean. Some of the dolphins were over 20-years old & had spent their entire lives in captivity. They had never been taught to hunt. They had never been free. The dolphins swam out to the ocean, but they were confused. All day & all night they waited for Lily to bring them back in. They bopped up & down in the waves, calling out to Lily in their high-pitch cries, “Why?” But Lily wanted them to go away, so he & his staff grabbed their guns and fired shots at the dolphins. Finally, the animals got the hint and swam away. For the next couple of days, Lily would sometimes see his dolphins coming back. He ignored them and eventually they disappeared for good.

A January 3rd, 2010 article posted on the TimesOnline.com website stated “Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans,” with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be given the legal rights as ‘non-human persons.’

A friend of mine, Patrick Cooke, told me a story about something that happened in 1965 when he was in the Navy, stationed in Hawaii: “What happened was: there were these 2 scientists who were the keepers of 12 dolphins, and what they did was train these dolphins to put mines (explosives) on enemy ships. Well, it’s a reality they’re very good at it, but there’s no way in hell the dolphins would get far enough away from the explosion, and they’d be killed. Every successful mission would be a suicide mission. The scientists felt sympathy for the dolphins, and they opened the gate and released them to the wild. Immediately, the government stepped in and charged the scientists with a 107 federal charges, e.g. misappropriation of property, etc. Well, they went to court and the Navy presented 65 witnesses against the two scientists. Then the defense stood up and laid down 2 documents in front of the judge: the Geneva Convention, and a pile of scientific studies on dolphin intelligence. The defense asked the judge to review them and the judge took the documents into his chamber. Then he came out and said that according to the documents he read, he determined “dolphins qualify under the Geneva Convention as another race on this planet, and that these 2 scientists were, in fact, freeing prisoners.” And the defense won their case.

So, in conclusion: dolphins are so intelligent that they qualify as a race of people under the Geneva Convention.

~ AA