Maybe we should get a handle on what Earthling NHI is all about before we enter classified negotiations with UFOs over access to free energy. (Sarasota Dolphin Research Program)
One of the least worthless reports in the UFO docs released by the Pentagon on Friday describes an encounter over the Gulf of Oman on 8 September 2021. A U.S. gunship was conducting target practice on a water-activated flare when two orbs popped up on infrared and hovered 20 feet over the surface for maybe 15 seconds. As the gunner unloaded his 105mm cannon, the visitors played tag and took off unscathed. The partially redacted CENTCOM report described their getaway like dance moves in a musical:
“Two UAPs were observed flying in loose but coordinated formation in increasing and decreasing altitude like a wave while maneuvering around, over, and under each other in a manner similar to how dolphins playfully swim in a pod.”
Constructive analogy. Sounds like the orbs were razzing Earth’s apex predators. Reminds me of a sailing incident when some friends and I were approached by three or four bottlenose dolphins surfacing in tandem and making heavy eye contact. We interpreted their performance as an invitation to follow, and they led us straight into a sandbar where our trimaran ran aground. The pranksters then shot off in a whitewater commotion that sounded like applause.
So maybe we should talk about dolphins. Let’s start with MML0535.
The stingray wins
From the 176 officially recorded sightings before her death in October 2005, MML0535 trolled Sarasota Bay largely as a loner. She was different from her peers, maybe even shunned. Afflicted with congenital scoliosis, MML0535 stopped growing at age 4 and remained stunted at three-quarters of her projected adult size. She bore sharkbite scars, like a lot of dolphins, but blunt-force trauma indicators suggested she may have been bullied by her own kind as well.
Worse, MML0535 was partially blind. Inferentially, she had been thrashing for prey in the shallows when she brushed a stingray. The cartilaginous batoid jabbed its venomous spine directly into her eye, and the tip broke off. She endured the horrific aftermath until, one day, much later, finally, the jagged fragment migrated to her heart, punctured her aorta, and put an end to MML0535’s struggles.
MML0535 could’ve headed south to Charlotte Harbor, or migrated up to Tampa Bay, to escape, if not the pain, then the trauma of where it began. Dolphins come and go all the time. But MML0535 chose to spend her days here, in a bittersweet ecosystem infected every so often with red tide, an occasional boost of raw sewage, bacteria, heavy metals and the din of inboards and outboards with scarring blades and a cacophony of human noise as tenacious as tinnitus. And while gutting it out here for 18 years, she even managed to raise two healthy calves, C991 and C992.
Today, MML0535’s bones are stored in a massive repository of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. Sponsored by Brookfield Zoo Chicago, SDRP operates the world’s longest-running systematic study of a totally unharnessed nonhuman intelligence, which began reshaping itself back in the early Eocene Epoch.
Cheap tricks for the monkeys
Within 20 million years of the collapse of the dinosaurs, a wolf-like carnivore on the other side of the world began to bail on land’s limitations for a return to the water. Pakicetus shed its hooves and became the ancestor to a flurry of cetaceans that now have theoretical access to three-quarters of the planet’s biosphere. Piercing the murky depths for whales, porpoises and dolphins is advanced brainpower with wave-projection capacities envied by navies from here to Russia and North Korea.
Whether running classified military missions, harbor security, retrieving submerged objects from the bottom, or maybe just innocuous fin-shaking for tourists at Sea World, marine mammals born into a human system for profit or utility understand the rules of captivity: Follow orders, get free gulps of fresh herring and squid, and disarm the terrestrial monkeys with cheap tricks. It’s ridiculously easy, and beguiling. Because cetaceans’ true intellect remains opaque. They understand us well enough to make a living, but that “conversation” flows one way. We have no idea what they’re saying to each other.
And that’s a decent news peg, given the surge of public interest in UFO/UAP. Space aliens, cryptoterrestrials, ultraterrestrials, interdimensionals, time travelers – whatever you want to call them, we act like we’re chomping at the bit for formal contact with superior beings.
But the sad fact is, we can’t even understand fellow Earthlings who enjoy a 45-million year evolutionary brainpower advantage. Their embodiment of NHI is fully wired for acoustic communications, a far more efficient and reliable measure of situational reality than the cumbersome ambiguity of language. Maybe we should try to figure out what local NHI has to say about us before we start making assumptions about UAP.
Nowhere to hide
Or maybe not. Local NHI would probably just accuse us of crimes against nature. Still, if you were inclined to take a pass at it, Sarasota Bay is a world-renowned open laboratory. Because this place is wired for passive and active spying on dolphins.
Of the 5,000 individual dolphins entered into the SDRP’s files since 1970, roughly 170 at any given moment are considered full-time residents who spend their entire lives building family histories in this 40-mile enclave off the Gulf of Mexico. The Bay has been a magnet for investigators from more than 45 nations, delivering material for more than 350 peer-reviewed publications, four books, and 150-plus technical reports. Drawing on six generations of resident dolphins, some 55 master’s and 60 doctoral students have studied behaviors, diet, health, prey, genetic legacies and practically anything else that can shed light on these superbrains.
For the past nine years, adding to the corpus of recorded vocalizations and activity acquired through satellite telemetry, a network of 18 solar-powered hydrophones, called passive listening stations (PALS), has been eavesdropping on the estuary for natural sounds. PALS data complements another surveillance system called the Sarasota Coast Acoustic Network. SCAN researchers tag other species – sharks, rays, mullet, etc. – with transmitters that activate some 80 receivers scattered about the Bay floor whenever the targeted fish approach. Their recordings provide clues to behaviors, distribution, and other previously inaccessible quirks about the cetaceans’ submarine world.
There’s another innovation called DTAGs, digital acoustic archival tags applied with suction cups to Sarasota’s dolphins during health assessments. The reusable sensors record individual movements like compass headings, depth, and acceleration. The DTAG falls off within 24 hours and sends location signals for easy retrieval and downloading.
The lure of acoustic fingerprints
Furthermore, where blimps once provided the birds-eye view on surface activity, more efficient drones can now deploy at a moment’s notice to track dolphins’ meanderings above and below. When the mammals submerge, another acoustic sensor can be lowered into the Bay by drone from a thin 100-foot cable for even sharper profiling.
“We can now watch what they’re doing from the air and have an underwater soundtrack that finally provides a behavioral context for the sounds we’re hearing,” says SDRP founder and Director Emeritus Randy Wells. “It’s opened up all kinds of possibilities. Lots of sounds they make out there, we don’t even understand yet.”
The most celebrated dolphin emissions are sonar waves, the high-frequency clicks that can identify prey, foe, and everything in between from more than a football field away. There are indecipherable “burst pulses,” low-pitched squawks, blats and “raspberries” recorded mainly during socializing. But maybe the most promising lead emerged with the discovery of signature whistles.
Those chirping sounds confirmed that our aquatic neighbors grasp the abstract concept of names, and the archives are packed with documented call-and-response exchanges between mothers and calves. Furthermore, when those recordings are converted to spectrograms, each vocalization produces a digital autograph as unique as a fingerprint. Spectrogram patterns now authenticate fin-matching software that identifies individuals formerly recognized solely by the subtle nicks and notches on their dorsals.
Like hieroglyphics, these spectrograms identify 269 dolphins in Sarasota Bay. (Sarasota Dolphin Research Program)
SDRP has verified signature whistles based on 1,000 unique recordings of almost 300 dolphins, and it has produced computer-generated echoes of those vocalized identities. Playback experiments show synthetic whistles can provoke a dolphin into altering course and moving toward the source.
“When you strip out the voice information that goes along with the whistle and play a computer-generated version, they respond the same way they would to the voice,” says Wells, who began his immersion into the hidden realm as a high school volunteer in 1970. “They’re not responding to the voice, they’re responding to the structure of the whistle, the curve of the sound. The structure is the information content.”
Also embedded within those whistles are variations apparently unrelated to name recognition, and researchers are crafting algorithms to examine patterns for something we can understand. Likewise, deep in the Caribbean, code-cracking linguists with the Cetacean Translation Initiative are applying machine learning to sperm whale exchanges off the coast of Dominica. CETI is chasing the hypothesis that brief rhythmic whale clicks, called codas, form the rudiments of an alphabet. The research, and controversy, continue.
But after 56 years of studying Sarasota Bay’s habitat, Randy Wells says dolphins who choose to interact with humans “usually do so to their detriment.” He’s seen it all, the speedboat collisions, the debilitating entanglements with monofilament lines, the ingestion of human trash, fishing gear, plastics. He’s seen dolphins begging for handouts and raising multiple generations of freeloaders whose unnatural imitative behaviors are culminating in higher mortality rates.
The triumph of plastics
But the worst potential outcomes aren’t necessarily matters of choice. In 2023, Wells and fellow SDRP researchers published perhaps the most unsettling findings yet. Not only are the preyfish infested with microplastics, every dolphin sampled in the Bay tested positive for plastic particles expelled on exhalations. In other words, the very air they breathe – the very air we breathe – is peppered with toxic nanoplastic fibers.
“We haven’t been collecting data long enough to begin looking at long-term health effects,” says Wells. “We’re actually using humans as a model in looking for changes that could happen over time.”
Microplastics might someday prove to be the undoing of the species that created them. In discussions of NHI, the veteran marine biologist cautions against grading the acronym on an anthropomorphic scale. “The biggest problem is people saying that intelligence is considered just to be a human characteristic, because it isn’t,” Wells says. “There are so many variations. An octopus faces a different set of issues to make a living every day, and yet they’re considered to be very intelligent.
“The intelligence we’re familiar with is something that talks about how well an animal can solve problems in its environment.”
Maybe we’ll get IQ points for a $600 million $900 million White House “ballroom” that nobody wants?
Decades ago, when stores starting going for plastic bags over paper bags, I thought wow, this is great, look at all those trees we'll be saving.
While I read all of this episode, most of it beyond my pay grade, I was haunted by the image of MML0535, a brave, endearing, courageous individual. She deserved a name. The fact that she lived as long as she did, raised 2 calves proves something about life force. How sad that what was once viewed as a positive, plastic, may be our undoing.