The NASA Dolphin Experiment | Margaret Howe Lovatt’s Story
In the 1960s, NASA funded a wild experiment to see if humans could talk to aliens. But before calling Mars, they decided to practice on dolphins.
The plan was simple, flood a house in the Caribbean with water so a researcher named Margaret Howe Lovatt could live with a dolphin named Peter 24/7.
The goal was to teach Peter to speak English. At first, things were going well. Peter was actually mimicking sounds and “saying” words. But then, a problem arose… Peter hit puberty.
He became aggressive and constantly tried to woo Margaret, which made teaching him impossible. Initially, whenever Peter got “excited,” they would transport him to a separate tank to be with female dolphins. But this took a lot of time, disrupted the lessons, and ruined the flow of the experiment.
So, Margaret made a controversial decision for the sake of efficiency. She decided to relieve Peter’s “male urges” herself manually. She justified it strictly as a scientific necessity, it was faster, it calmed him down immediately, and it allowed them to get right back to the English lessons.
But while Peter was falling in love, the experiment was falling apart.
The head of the project, Dr. John Lilly, started injecting other dolphins with LSD, and NASA quickly realized the whole thing was spiraling out of control. They cut the funding and closed the lab.
Margaret was sent home, and Peter was shipped off to a small, dark tank in Miami. Separated from the woman he had bonded with, Peter became deeply depressed. A few weeks later, he took his own life. Peter sank to the bottom of the tank, closed his blowhole, and refused to breathe again.
