What People Are Misunderstanding This Week: Did Dolphins Really Abduct a Florida Man?

Breaking news from Florida: Lee County Sheriff’s Department officials recently arrested a man on a beach near the Sanibel Dam. The unnamed suspect was found soaking wet and drawing detailed diagrams in the sand. He told officials he was kidnapped by dolphins, dragged underwater, and forced to build an underwater city. The man said the lead dolphin, “Gerald,” communicated with him by clicking and found a way to help him breathe for several days. More details can be found in this TikTok video, which has been viewed over five million times in the past few days:

As expected, the story turned out to be false: no one was arrested (why would they have been arrested even if they had been?); the incident never happened.

A patient dolphin expert debunks these and other claims about dolphins.

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 on animal cognition, a dolphin scientist, and the author of Are Dolphins Really Smart? If anyone knows the truth about dolphin swamp cities, it’s Justin Gregg.

Steven Johnson : Do dolphins use humans for construction work in aquatic environments?

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

SJ : Do dolphins even live in underwater cities?

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

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

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

SJ : Okay, but should dolphins live in cities?

JG: Dolphins aren’t static animals. They have places to go and things to do. They wouldn’t need a city… everything in their body has evolved to allow them to swim freely, live in groups, and move between them. It’s like asking: why don’t dogs fly?

SJ: Dolphins have very well-developed hunting behavior, right? For example, they work in groups to herd fish. Could they use this to kidnap a human?

JG: I don’t even know what “abducted” means for a dolphin. Where are they taken and why? It’s weird.

SJ : Changing the subject a bit: the dolphin in the story is named Gerald. Do you know him?

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

SJ : So you’re absolutely sure that dolphins don’t live in underwater cities and call themselves Gerald?

JG: Yes, and if you ask any scientist who studies dolphins, you’ll get exactly the same answer. No professor will say, “I saw this city.”

Still, the fact that enough people believed this story for the sheriff’s office to issue a statement denying it says something about the strange place dolphins occupy in our collective unconscious; if this story had been about sea otters, no one would have believed it. Dolphins have been the focus of conspiracy theories since the 1960s, when the world’s leading dolphin researcher attributed superhuman abilities to these marine mammals. And the kidnapping story bears some resemblance to what actually happened.

Tiao, the Brazilian killer dolphin

Dolphins may not kidnap people, but they do occasionally display aggression , and in 1994, a dolphin killed a man in Brazil . Tiao was a so-called “lone dolphin”—a dolphin that prefers to interact with people over its own kind. Tiao became a tourist attraction at Caraguatatuba Beach, where people swam with him, stuffed popsicle sticks into his blowhole, and tried to force beer into his mouth (yay, people!). In December 1994, two swimmers, Wilson Reis Pedroso and João Paulo Moreira, apparently went too far. They reportedly molested Tiao, and the dolphin broke Pedroso’s ribs and headbutted Moreira so hard that he died.

It seems the dolphin got away with it too. There was no trial. Tiao swam around the city for a few months, as if to say, “I wish someone would do this,” and then swam away that summer, likely joining a pod. He’s a good boy.

John C. Lilly: The Man Behind the Strange Things People Believe About Dolphins.

If you’ve ever wondered why your mushroom shop assistant has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle, you can thank one person: John C. Lilly . Lilly is the inventor of the sensory isolation chamber and the father of dolphin conspiracy theories. “He was a doctor who discovered that dolphins have large brains,” Gregg said. “It was a big deal when this discovery was made in the ’60s. They started doing experiments and claiming that dolphins were pretty good learners, like dogs.”

But John Lilly went even further. Lilly believed dolphins were smarter than dogs and smarter than humans. It was the 1960s, so Lilly’s ideas were taken seriously by serious people, at least at first. “He was beloved for a couple of years… he even got a lot of money from the government, from NASA, to study dolphins because he said, ‘If we can decipher dolphin language, we can decipher alien code,'” says Gregg.

Sex and drugs in a dolphin den

Lilly took NASA money and built “Dolphinarium”—a house on St. Thomas with a partially submerged floor—so his wife, Margaret Howe Lovatt, could live, eat, and sleep in the same space with a dolphin named Peter. The idea was to isolate the dolphin so it could only communicate with humans, and then have him learn to speak. That didn’t happen, but Lovatt “fell in love” with the dolphin despite the language barrier. She eventually “seduced” (abused) the dolphin, too, but only to get him to focus on English lessons, she claimed. Then John Lilly gave him LSD, because maybe that would make a difference? (According to Gregg, LSD doesn’t seem to affect dolphins, but you still shouldn’t give it to them. “You’ll violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act and go to jail, so don’t do it.”)

Ultimately, Lilly’s money ran out, and the experiment was deemed a failure. Peter later reportedly committed suicide by consuming dolphin breath—dolphins breathe voluntarily, and Peter simply decided not to. (I wouldn’t be surprised if isolation and years of abuse from the mad hippie scientists played a role.)

Rather than question his premise, Lilly concluded that the barrier to interspecies communication was not a lack of intelligence, but a difference in dimensions. So he took massive amounts of ketamine in sensory deprivation tanks and spent days talking with space dolphins.

(All this is described in detail in John C. Lilly’s excellent book , Man and the Dolphin , which you should read immediately.)

Dolphin Research: Back on Track.

John C. Lilly’s story is both amusing and disturbing to me, but for dolphin researchers, it’s far less pleasant. “Lilly essentially set dolphin research back about 20 years because everyone was afraid to say, ‘I study dolphins,'” Gregg said. “Now we’re all back on track. It’s now legal to study dolphins,” he added.

Military dolphins

Following his seminal masterpiece, The Graduate, director Mike Nichols made the 1973 film , The Day of the Dolphin , in which the CIA uses the research of a John Lilly-like scientist to train a dolphin to assassinate the president. And there’s a tiny grain of truth to the film. The US Navy’s Marine Mammal Research Program has been training bottlenose dolphins and seals to detect mines since the 1950s. Meanwhile, in Russia, dolphins are reportedly being equipped with special weaponized harnesses to kill enemy divers. This is true . Although, as Gregg notes, “you can train a rat, a cat, or a dog if you simply attach the right dangerous weapon and apply the right reward system.”

Other myths associated with dolphins

Here’s a quick debunking of some other dolphin myths, many of which are covered in Gregg’s book , Are Dolphins Really Smart ?

• Dolphins save drowning people : There have been cases where dolphins have appeared to nudge drowning people toward shore, but we don’t know if they’re “saving” them. They may be following their natural instinct—they also nudge dead seals and logs. This is likely due to survivorship bias: if a dolphin nudges you toward shore, it’s a miracle. If it nudges you into the sea, you won’t be alive to tell the tale.

• Dolphins are peaceful animals ; they can be aggressive toward people. Sometimes they attack porpoises for no apparent reason.

• Dolphins smile: that is the shape of their jaws.

• Dolphin echolocation can cure cancer : this has actually been studied , and there is no doubt about it.

• Female dolphins have a corkscrew-shaped vagina : Wait, it’s true! Cool!

• Dolphins are on the brink of extinction: To conclude on a positive note: while some dolphin species, particularly river dolphins, are endangered, the iconic bottlenose dolphin is generally doing well. Their status is “least concern,” meaning their population is stable, with numbers estimated at hundreds of thousands or millions worldwide.

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