NASA-funded experiment went horribly wrong after dolphin 'fell in love' with his trainer

NASA send out funding for all manner of things across the world, but it is unlikely they anticipated how wrong this experiment could have gone.

Back in the 1960s, Margaret Howe Lovatt, from St Thomas, U.S.Virgin Island was a key part of a rather unexpected, but perfectly 'normal' experiment involving dolphins.

In her early 20s, she moved to the island after hearing they had a lab full of dolphins as she wanted to be part of their research.

Despite her lack of scientific experience - describing herself as a naturalist - she managed to win over the director of the laboratory, Gregory Bateson, and was invited back to the lab after driving to it on a whim.

While at the lab, she became acquainted with neuroscientist John Lilly who was building a research laboratory with funding from NASA and the United States Navy with the goal of speaking extraterrestrial life forms.

As a sort of test run for this, Lily built a sort of dolphin house flooded with water known as the ‘Dolphinarium’.

NASA were funding the dolphin experiments before funding was cut(Getty Stock Image)

Lilly accommodated three dolphins, two females named Sissy and Pamela and one younger male bottlenose dolphin named Peter.

And this is about the last bit of normalcy in this story...

Lovatt was determined to get Peter talking and was well aware he and the other dolphins could mimic human voices.

In hopes that speaking English around Peter would allow him to mimic better, in a similar way a mother teaches a child to speak, she decided to move in to the Dolphinarium.

But the experiment seems to get derailed due to the ‘sexual urges’ of the dolphin as it was reaching adulthood. This initially meant the time between Peter and Lovatt had to be cut short so that he could... mingle with the other two females.

However, Lovatt grew tired of these interruptions and decided to help out young Peter... manually, if you catch my drift?

To explain this bizarre turn of events she said: “Peter liked to be with me.

“He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls.”

Speaking about how she... helped him along, she added: “I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn’t rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that’s how it seemed to work out. It wasn’t private. People could observe it.

“It wasn’t sexual on my part. Sensuous perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer. Not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that’s really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter."

Peter and Lovatt grew... mighty close (Getty Stock Image)

Hustler eventually got a hold of the intimate nature between the two and dramatized the situation.

As you can imagine, the appearance in the magazine massively overshadowed the experiment and reflected badly on the research.

This eventually led to Lilly's Dolphinarium being defunded, due to the bad publicity and the lack of results for communication experiments.

Lovatt defended her relationship with Peter and attempted to explain her research further to distance herself from controversy, as seen in the BBC documentary The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins.