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With the all the advancements in AI and having humans travel the farthest ever from Earth, lets take it back to the 60s and see what scientific breakthroughs were happening.
🗓️ Today in History
April 17th, 1961 - Marks 65 Years Since One of the Biggest Blunders in American History
On this day, 65 years ago, around 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA landed on the southern coast of Cuba with one goal. Take down Fidel Castro, the dictator who had taken over Cuba two years earlier and turned it into a communist state 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
The CIA had spent over a year secretly training Cuban exiles while Eisenhower was still in office, but he never launched it. That decision got passed to JFK, who had been president for only 87 days when he gave the green light. The operation was called Brigade 2506, and the entire strategy rested on one assumption. That Castro had enough enemies inside Cuba that once the exiles landed, more Cubans would join the fight and finish it for them.
That did not happen.
Castro was already 2 steps ahead. Cuban forces knew the invasion was coming and were ready for them. Kennedy, trying to keep the U.S. involvement quiet, cancelled the air support at the last minute. Without it, the exiles were sitting ducks. The whole operation collapsed in 72 hours. More than 1,200 men were captured and spent the next 20 months in Cuban prisons. Kennedy went on TV and owned it, saying the defeat was entirely his responsibility. It was one of the most embarrassing moments in U.S. foreign policy history.
❓ Trivia
Who is the highest grossing actor of all-time?
P.S. We’re now breaking down the answers at the end of each edition, so you get a little more insight.
When NASA Tried to Train Dolphins to Talk to Humans
In 1959, neuroscientist John C. Lilly decided his normal research wasn’t ambitious enough. So he set up shop in the Caribbean, founding the Communication Research Institute in St. Thomas with a goal that sounds like sci-fi even today: teach humans to talk to dolphins.
This wasn’t fringe right away. Dolphins were (and are) freakishly intelligent, and Lilly became convinced they might be capable of something close to language. By the early 1960s, he was claiming dolphins could mimic human speech, which caught the attention of NASA. Their angle was: if we ever meet aliens, how do we even start communicating? Dolphins became the test case.
Then the experiment took a hard left turn.
By 1964, Lilly had fully embraced the era and started experimenting with LSD. His logic: if the human mind could expand under psychedelics, maybe dolphin minds could too, and maybe that would accelerate interspecies communication.
So yes, he took LSD himself. And yes, he gave it to dolphins. The result? Not exactly a breakthrough. The dolphins didn’t start speaking English, didn’t unlock some hidden cosmic channel, and didn’t suddenly reveal the secrets of the universe. Mostly, they just acted… like dolphins on drugs, no meaningful progress, just increasingly bizarre experiments.
In June 1965, researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt moved into a partially flooded lab, basically a house turned into a dolphin tank, to live 24/7 with a young male dolphin named Peter. The idea was immersion: constant proximity might finally crack the code on language.
What actually happened was… complicated.
Lovatt worked daily to teach Peter English, building an intense bond in the process. When Peter’s natural behaviors started interfering with training sessions, one of the most controversial aspects of the experiment happened. Lovatt handled Peter’s sexual behavior. Dolphins are highly social and sexual animals, and Peter, an adolescent male, would frequently act up. Rather than constantly interrupting the work or relocating him, Lovatt later said she chose to manually relieve him as a practical, time-saving measure to maintain focus and continuity in the experiment. It fueled debates about ethics, boundaries, and just how far researchers were willing to go.
By late 1965, things were unraveling. Lilly’s growing obsession with psychedelics, lack of real progress, and increasingly unconventional methods started raising eyebrows. Funding partners, including NASA, pulled out in early 1966. The lab shut down.
The experiments take another turn down a darker road.
Peter got moved to a facility in Miami, nothing like the open, hands-on setup he’d been living in. Separated from Margaret and stuck alone in a small, bare tank, it was a decline into depression. He became withdrawn, stopped engaging, and eventually stopped eating and interacting. Not long after, he sank to the bottom of the tank and didn’t come back up. Dolphins don’t breathe automatically like we do, they choose each breath. Some researchers interpreted what happened as a suicide.
Whether you call it a failed experiment, a cautionary tale, or one of the strangest detours in Cold War science, this is true: For a brief moment in the 1960s, the U.S. was funding a project that tried to prepare humanity for alien contact… by living with dolphins and hoping, somehow, they’d start talking back.
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For Your Weekend Viewing Pleasure
At Dude Stuff, we are big fans of documentaries, in every which way they come in. Here are two that we highly recommend:
Icarus
Icarus starts as a Lance Armstrong experiment and turns into one of the wildest sports scandals ever caught on film. Director Bryan Fogel originally sets out to see how much performance-enhancing drugs actually help cycling, but while he’s doing his self-test he gets connected to Russian anti-doping scientist Grigory Rodchenkov, and that’s when the whole thing detonates. What starts as a quirky documentary about cheating in sports morphs into a full-blown geopolitical cover-up involving state-sponsored doping at the Olympic level.
LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching takes something most people think of as quiet and harmless, birdwatching, and turns it into a full-blown endurance sport. It follows competitive “listers,” people who travel the world chasing rare sightings to build the longest possible bird lists, often pushing through brutal terrain, exhaustion, and obsessive planning just to tick off a single species. What starts as a niche hobby quickly turns into a high-stakes game of numbers, status, and personal obsession, where seeing a bird in the wild can mean more than just a photo, it’s a point on the board.
Link to watch: Click Here
🍽️ Last Bite
🎰 Trivia Breakdown
Zoë Saldaña took the crown from Scarlett Johansson earlier this year. Through roles in massive franchises like Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Trek, she’s quietly stacked appearances in some of the highest-grossing films ever made. Put it all together and she’s credited with being the highest-grossing actor of all time
What’d you think of today’s edition? 👇
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