In 1961, the great scientist Carl Sagan joined a semi-secret society called the Order of the Dolphin, which hoped to establish communication with intelligent extraterrestrials. Among the society's members was a neuroscientist named John Lilly, who had made a name for himself popularizing the idea that dolphins have their own language, as well as a kind of super-intelligence that rivals our own. Crack the code of dolphinese, argued Lilly, and we will be able to decipher any alien language we might encounter.
The order's membersincluding the astrophysicist Frank Drake, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin took Lilly's idea about human-dolphin communication quite seriously. As the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett has noted, they wore insignia shaped like bottlenose dolphins and sent each other coded messages to hone their dolphinese and alien-language-decoding skills.
Sagan visited Lilly several times at his dolphin lab on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands during the 1960s and advised his new friend on how to design rigorous experiments that could reveal the existence of dolphin language. But Lilly rejected Sagan's advice and forged ahead with bizarre experiments involving sensory-deprivation tanks and dolphins living in flooded houses. He even injected his dolphin subjects with LSD to help stimulate two-way communication. As Lilly's career drifted far from the kind of mainstream science that Sagan championed, the two parted ways, and the Order of the Dolphin was forgotten.
Dr. Gregg is the author of "Are Dolphins Really Smart? The Mammal Behind the Myth," just published by Oxford University Pres
