#freeflipper

Here’s a surprise - this book is about exactly what it sounds like. Perhaps more surprising - the author responsible for this book, ‘Dolphins, Extraterrestrials, Angels’, isn’t even the only person to draw those three things together. 

Timothy Wyllie, who you get to see a picture of in his hot tub on the backcover, yay, wrote this autobiographical story about his “adventures among Spiritual Intelligences.” As if the horrible New Agey artwork of aliens abducting dolphins wasn’t bad enough, unnecessary capitals are always a red flag of the bad things to come. Wyllie, or Father Micah as he was known when he was part of The Process (an offshoot of Scientology) tries to convince us of the “metanoic certainty” of dolphin-human telepathy, the Urantia prophecy, and that a host of celestial seraphim came to Earth to tell him that it was cool for him to take all the drugs he wanted because he had “the perfect protection of heaven” - lucky guy!

The reason I bought this book (from Glastonbury, where else) is that I’m interested in how animals may be perceived by the metaphysical community to have supernatural powers. In the 1960s, Dr John Lilly, inventor of the isolation tank, began studying cetacean psychology through experiments financially backed by NASA. Lilly became enamoured with the idea that hallucinogens would enable us to reach new heights of consciousness, such that would allow interspecies psychic unity, and even injected his dolphins with LSD to see if that would help. Lilly is obviously Wyllie’s hero, but his research came to nothing, and in his drug-addled haze Lilly lost his funding and his credibility. Interestingly, he later became a campaigner for cetacean rights, and became anti-animals in captivity.

And because the US military has always taken an interest in psychic warfare, especially if the Soviets are doing it too, it might not be a coincidence that both the America and the Russian navy have squads of trained dolphins (dolphins have badass echolocation powers which could have military applications, but reports of them having knives strapped to their heads to stab underwater spies is a lot, A LOT, less cool). It’s not hard to believe that the military still do, or might again, investigate the possibility of weaponising the alleged psychic capacities of dolphins, mostly because the military can be such a bizarre and ludicrous place.