A question that has been on my mind recently and has been asked in editorials both in and out of the United States has been: when did the United Ztates lose its marbles? Our goldfish historical memory has forgotten the bizarreness of George “Dubya” Bush, lost behind the lunatic glare of the present incumbent. But even behind him, there was the strange presidency of Ronald Reagan that was considered so nuts at the time as to get its own laugh line in the first Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). “Ronald Reagan?” Christopher Lloyd yells disbelievingly. “The actor!?”

And yet the answer might require even further delving, as Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’ excellently informative and entertaining essay documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office proves. The film is narrated by Chloë Sevigny with a deadpan resolve to give Lilly a hearing, while at the same time not to drink the Koolaid. That of course refers to another time (The Jonestown Massacre) when a substantial group of Americans lost their minds and tragically their lives soon after.

The case of John Lilly is fascinating because we see him first as a conventional scientist in the 1950s, whose work is pushing the envelope in studying animal communication in regard to dolphins. Independently wealthy, Lilly makes bold claims about interspecies communication, but is also way ahead of his time in his conceptualising of animals as having consciousnesses, as well as a justifiable concern in what would become artificial intelligence. He is highly respected within the scientific community as well as provoking the interest of the military and intelligence communities. He is an early member of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, arguing quite reasonably that the challenges of communicating with other species overlaps with those of communicating with aliens.

In the midst of the work, there are marriages and strange domestic happenings which hint at a certain utopic urge. His house is flooded in order to allow the dolphins to live on the lower floors and one of the female scientists seems to be crossing the line with her interspecies communication. If Lilly at this stage appears to be something out of a science fiction movie, then it will come as no surprise that he inspires two major motion pictures. Mike Nichols’ Day of the Dolphin (1973) has the unbeatable tagline: “Unwittingly he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States.”

The second film, Ken Russell’s 1980 movie Altered States, concentrated on Lilly’s other area of interest: isolation tanks and drug use. These had crossed over with Lilly injecting dolphins with LSD and some scientists were beginning to criticise Lilly’s approach and his far-reaching, but very much reaching, hypotheses. As he became a committed user of LSD and ketamine, Lilly described reaching back to his primate ancestors as well as discovering a shadowy body he identified as ECCO, the titular Earth Coincidence Control Office. This is reminiscent of an episode from science fiction author Philip K Dick’s life when he had a vision that convinced him that he was a recipient of extraterrestrial information which he was merely translating into novels. When Dick told a packed convention assembled in his honour in Lille that his novels were in a very real sense true, they responded with a bemusement from which he never quite recovered.

Lilly was to continue to exert an influence on a counterculture that was less rigorous than the scientific community in wanting, you know, facts. He was an articulate spokesperson and a prolific writer, but his ideas were closer to those of magus and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of the few contemporaries to participate in the film. Almereyda and Stephens use a wide array of startling images and at some points the film participates in its own Chris Marker inspired poetry, even as Sevigney’s voice keeps everything in the bounds of the reasonable.

Today, magical thinking is becoming increasingly mainstream. At the time of writing raspy voiced nutcase, Robert Kennedy Jr is about to be installed as the head of health and human services of the American government and conspiracy theorists of the wildest stripe have their hands on the levers of power. A figure like John Lilly risks seeming a little quaint, but there is a warning in his case. When science loses its essential seriousness, its strict assumption of doubt, when it stops trying to disprove its own hypothesis and starts to wishfully head in the direction of our desires, then that way lie dragons. And we won’t like them.

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office just premiered in the 54th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam