Did Dolphins Kidnap a Florida Man?: What People Are Getting Wrong This Week

Latest news out of Florida: Lee County deputies reportedly recently arrested a man on the beach near the Sanibel Causeway. The unnamed suspect was found soaking wet and drawing detailed diagrams in the sand. He told authorities he was kidnapped by dolphins, dragged beneath the surface and forced to build an underwater city. The man said the chief dolphin, “Gerald”, communicated with him through clicks and found a way to help him breathe for several days. You can get more details in this TikTok video which has been viewed more than five million times in recent days:

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that this story is false: no one was arrested (why would they be, even if it happened?); the incident never happened.

Patient dolphin expert debunks these and other dolphin claims

I spoke with Justin Gregg of the Dolphin Communication Project to find out the truth about our aquatic friends (or enemies?). Gregg is an expert in animal cognition, a dolphin scientist and the author of Are dolphins really intelligent?. If anyone knows the truth about dolphin-soaked cities, it’s Justin Gregg.

Stephen Johnson: Do dolphins use humans for construction projects in aquatic environments?

Justin Gregg: No. It’s crazy. Absolutely not.

S.J.: Do dolphins even live in underwater cities?

JG: No, that’s also crazy. First, they don’t build anything. They don’t have thumbs.

S.J.: Maybe that’s why they need to kidnap people.

J.G.: Look at it this way: why do humans build shelters? Because it’s raining or something. Do dolphins protect themselves from the rain? No, it’s already wet.

S.J.: Okay, but should do dolphins live in cities?

JG: Dolphins are not stationary animals. They have places to go and things to do. There would be no reason for them to have a city… everything about them evolved to help them become free-swimming animals that live in swimming groups. It’s like asking: why don’t dogs fly?

SJ: Dolphins have sophisticated hunting behavior, don’t they? They work together in groups to herd fish, for example. Could they do this to kidnap a person?

JG: I don’t even know what “kidnapping” would mean for a dolphin. Where would they take them and why? It’s weird.

S.J.: Change the subject a little: The dolphin in the story is called “Gerald”. Do you know him?

JG: Nobody knows Gerald, because Gerald doesn’t exist.

S.J.: So, are you POSITIVE, dolphins don’t live in underwater cities and are called Gerald?

JG: Yes, and if you ask any scientist about dolphins, you’ll get the exact same answer. There is no professor anywhere who says, “I have seen the city.”

Still, the fact that enough people believed the story that the sheriff’s office had to issue a statement denying it speaks volumes about the strange place dolphins occupy in our collective cultural unconscious; If this story was about sea otters, no one would have believed it. Dolphins have been at the center of conspiracy theories since the 1960s, when the world’s leading dolphin researcher attributed superhuman powers to the marine mammals. And the story of the kidnapping is a little like something that actually happened.

Tião, Brazil’s murderous dolphin

Dolphins may not kidnap people, but they sometimes become aggressive, and in 1994 a dolphin killed a man in Brazil. Tião was what is known as a “lone dolphin,” a dolphin that likes to hang out with humans rather than its aqua-woods brethren. Tião became a tourist attraction on Caraguatatuba Beach, where people would swim with him, put ice cream sticks in his blowhole, and try to pour beer into his mouth (yes, people!). In December 1994, two swimmers, Wilson Reis Pedroso and João Paulo Moreira, apparently went too far. The two men allegedly harassed Tião, and the dolphin broke Pedroso’s ribs and headbutted Moreira so hard that the man died.

The dolphin also seems to have escaped. There was no trial. Tião swam around the city for a few months, as if to say: “I wish someone would be“, then left during the summer of the same year, probably after joining a band. Good for him.

John C. Lilly: the man behind the strange things people believe about dolphins

If you’ve ever wondered why your mushroom seller has a dolphin tattoo on his ankle, you have one man to thank: John C. Lilly. Lilly is the inventor of the sensory isolation tank and the father of dolphin-based conspiracy theories. “He was a doctor who discovered that dolphins had big brains,” Gregg said. “It was a big deal when it was discovered in the ’60s. They started doing experiments and saying they were pretty good at learning things, like dogs.”

But John Lilly went further. Lilly believed that dolphins were smarter than dogs and humans. This was the 1960s, so Lilly’s ideas were taken seriously by serious people, at least at first. “He was loved for a few years… he actually got a lot of money from the government, from NASA, to study dolphins, because he said, ‘if we can crack the code of dolphin language, we can crack the code of aliens,'” according to Gregg.

Sex and drugs at the dolphin trap

Lilly took money from NASA and built “The Dolphinarium”, a house on the island of Saint Thomas with a partially flooded floor, so that Lilly’s wife, Margaret Howe Lovatt, could live, eat and sleep in the same space as a dolphin named Peter. The idea was to isolate the dolphin so it could only socialize with one person. to have to learn to speak. This is not the case, but Lovatt “fell in love” with the dolphin despite the language barrier. She eventually “seduced” (abused) the dolphin as well, but only so that he would concentrate on his English lessons, she claimed. Then John Lilly dosed him with LSD, because maybe that would do something? (According to Gregg, LSD doesn’t seem to work on dolphins, but you still shouldn’t give it to them. “You’d be breaking the Marine Mammal Protection Act and you’d be thrown in jail, so don’t do that.”)

Regardless, Lilly’s money ran out and the experiment was considered a failure. Later, Peter would die of dolphin suicide – dolphins breathe voluntarily, and Peter simply decided not to do it one day. (I wouldn’t be surprised if being isolated and repeatedly abused for years by hippie mad scientists had something to do with it.)

Rather than question his premise, Lilly concluded that the obstacle to interspecies communication was not a lack of intellect, but a difference in dimensions. So he took a ton of ketamine in sensory deprivation tanks and talked to cosmic dolphins all day.

(All of this is detailed in John C. Lilly’s excellent book The man and the dolphinwhich you should read immediately.)

Dolphin research: back on track

John C. Lilly’s story is both hilarious and disturbing to me, but it is much less pleasant to dolphin researchers. “Lilly actually delayed studying dolphins for about 20 years, because everyone was afraid to say, ‘I’m studying dolphins,'” Gregg said. “We’re all back on track now. You can now legitimately study dolphins,” he added.

Military Dolphins

Director Mike Nichols followed up on his landmark masterpiece The graduate with The day of the dolphina 1973 film in which the CIA co-opts the research of a John Lilly-like scientist to train a dolphin to assassinate the president. And it’s based on the slightest grain of truth. The U.S. Navy’s marine mammal program has been training bottlenose dolphins and seals to detect mines since the 1950s. Meanwhile, in Russia, dolphins were reportedly strapped with armed harnesses to eliminate enemy divers. For real. However, as Gregg points out, “you can train a rat, a cat or a dog if you just attach the right dangerous weapon to it and give it the right reward system.”

Here’s a quick debunking of a few other dolphin-related myths, many of which are covered in Gregg’s book. Are dolphins really intelligent??

• Dolphins save drowning humans: There have been cases where dolphins appear to push drowning people towards shore, but we don’t know if they “rescue” them. They may be obeying their natural pushing instinct: they also push dead seals and logs. This is probably survival bias: if a dolphin pushes you to shore, it’s a miracle. If that pushes you to go to sea, you won’t be here to tell the story anyway.

• Dolphins are peaceful: They can become aggressive with people. They sometimes attack porpoises for no apparent reason.

• The dolphins smile: This is exactly how their jaws are formed.

• Dolphin echolocation can cure cancer: This has actually been investigated and there is nothing in there.

• Female dolphins have corkscrew-shaped vaginas: Wait, this one is true! Cool!

• Dolphins are on the verge of extinction: To end on a positive note: although certain species of dolphins are in danger, notably river dolphins, the emblematic bottlenose dolphins are overall doing well. Their status is “least concern,” meaning the population is stable and they number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, worldwide.