After learning about the experiment where a woman lived in a house with a dolphin to teach it, and by the end of the project she was instructed to jerk off the dolphin to calm him down, I cannot be surprised anymore
What?! You are remembering that story wrong. She was a dolphin trainer or some scientist and jerked of the dolphin because she thought the dolphin was depressed and lonely.
That experiment was proposed by Carl Sagan, though I'm reasonably certain he meant that we should inject the humans with LSD to learn dolphin languages, not the other way around.
Source? I don't think Sagan suggested the LSD use either way, that was John Lilly's thing.
Sagan was interested in Lilly's dolphin experiments because he was interested in developing inter species communication techniques, because he was really interested in how we could communicate with aliens.
Lilly was the psychonaut. He invented the sensory deprivation tank during the dolphin experiments, would use it on LSD to try to telepathically communicate with them, and gave the dolphins LSD a few times. Years after the dolphin experiments he went kind of nuts taking high dose ketamine and trying to communicate with aliens.
Haha, read his book. He wrote about kholing himself and in that state would receive communications from the aliens that are in a higher dimension and would give him instructions to change the course of events in this world to save humanity... Or something like that.
Also at one point during that he fell into his pool and nearly drowned.
It turns out they do this too in places where they keep dolphins in captivity. Like with theme parks that do shows with them. Most likely to calm them down and so they can keep them in smaller places backstage when there are no shows going on.