The popularity of space whale art can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. A few different cultural currents from that period coalesced into the 'space whale' motif. In brief, they are environmentalism, public awareness of scientific advances in understanding cetacean intelligence and behaviour, psychedelic drug culture, and space exploration.
The 1960s saw an increased concern for the welfare of cetaceans in the burgeoning environmentalist movement at the same time that Western scientists were starting to realise the intellectual capacities of cetaceans. Although efforts to curb whaling had begun earlier in the 20th century, it wasn't until the middle of the century that the public began to take a serious interest in anti-whaling campaigning.
The two scientists with the biggest impact in changing public perceptions of cetaceans were Jacques Cousteau and John C. Lilly. Building on recent improvements in diving technology, Cousteau first brought films of cetaceans to a large audience with his programme The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which aired from 1968 to 1975. Episode 4, "Whales", aired on ABC and the BBC on November 15, 1968. The episode featured several species of whale such as sperm and killer whales, using tracking tags to follow their migratory habits. The episode involved Cousteau giving a romantic account of great whales in the history of human legend. Whales were again featured in episode 8, "The Desert Whales", which aired on October 28, 1969, this time featuring California gray whales which were at the time little-known. The episode included footage of a gray whale mother feeding her baby. Later episodes in the early 1970s featured topics such as dolphin echolocation, humpback whale songs (which we'll get back to soon). This sort of footage of cetaceans going about their daily lives was hugely popular and helped raise the profile of whales and dolphins among a wide audience.
Meanwhile, John C. Lilly had been conducting research into dolphin communication since the 1950s. While some of his research was standard investigations of topics such as dolphin anatomy and brain structure, Lilly went way beyond that in his ideas about the potential of human-dolphin communication. He hypothesized in his 1961 book Man and Dolphin that once the interspecies communication code had been cracked, dolphins would eventually hold a Cetacean Chair at the United Nations in order to provide their input to world affairs. His work drew the attention of astronomers like Frank Drake, the founder of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and Carl Sagan. Lilly was invited to an important meeting of astronomers in 1961, where his theories about dolphins providing a model for extraterrestrial interspecies communication so excited the group that they started informally referring to themselves as The Order of the Dolphin. This enthusiasm drew funding from NASA for Lilly’s dolphin communication research. He created a "Dolphinarium" in St. Thomas which was a house flooded with water so as to facilitate human-dolphin cohabitation. He recruited local naturalist Margaret Howe Lowatt, whose job it was to teach an adolescent male dolphin called Peter how to speak.
Howe Lowatt gave Peter speech lessons twice a day, and they spent all of their time together. It was her idea to have the house completely waterproofed so that she could live there with Peter full-time. However, complications soon arose from the Dolphinarium which threw the project into controversy. Peter developed a sexual interest in Howe Lowatt. The logistics involved in transporting Peter to a pool where he could interact with female dolphins were considered too much of a disruption to his language lessons, so instead, Howe Lowatt relieved Peter of his sexual urges herself, using her feet to bring him to orgasm. An article on the project in Hustler in the 1970s called "Interspecies Sex: Humans and Dolphins" sensationalized the sexual aspect of the research. This cast a serious shadow on the project, though by that stage the cat was already out of the bag and Lilly's research was drawing attention to the potential of dolphin-human communication.
Dolphins weren't the only thing Lilly was being funded to research by the US government at the time. He was also licensed to study LSD, something the US was very interested in in the 1960s as part of its research into mind-altering substances, mental health treatment, and mind control. Lilly was first introduced to LSD by the wife of Ivan Tors, who had produced the movie Flipper in 1963. Tors funded some of Lilly's research in St. Thomas, and Lilly started giving LSD to dolphins in 1964. He also became a regular user of LSD himself and became deeply interested in its mind-expanding effects: As Ric O' Barry of the anti-whaling Dolphin Project put it, "I saw John go from a scientist with a white coat to a full blown hippy." Although Lilly reported that the dolphins became more “talkative” on LSD, it did nothing to improve their ability to speak English. By 1966 his interest in LSD was overtaking his interest in the dolphin project. The lab was eventually closed as funding dried up. Peter was sent to a lab in Miami where he was kept in a small tank with little sunlight. The separation from Howe Lovatt appeared to cause him great distress. After just a few weeks there, he died by suicide when he refused to resurface to breathe.
As unconventional (and unethical) as it was, Lilly's research gave a huge boost to the public interest in the potential of dolphin communication. Even as scientific support for his work evaporated, he published more than a dozen books about his mind-altering experiences, including what he claimed were telepathic communications he’d had with dolphins while on LSD. This soon had an impact on the creative industries. Lilly inspired the main character of Robert Merle's 1967 novel The Day of the Dolphin, in which dolphins are trained to communicate with humans for the purpose of warfare but ended up using their English-language abilities to save humans from nuclear war. In 1970, Roger Payne released the album Songs of the Humpback Whale, which presented recordings of humpback whale sounds as a musical album. The album became the best-selling nature recording in history, and National Geographic even distributed the discs to its 10.5 million subscribers in 1979.
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