RIC O'BARRY: They're always trying to communicate with us, and that's hard to explain. But when you live with them, like I did on the Flipper TV show, day and night, I can read that body language.

DR. JOHN POTTER: There's something visceral about being in the water with an animal like this. As a scientist, I'm trained to recognize intelligence through objective measures-- tool use, cognitive processes, and so on. As a human being, when I see a dolphin looking at me, and his eyes tracking me, and I lock eyes with that animal, there's a human response that makes it undeniable that I'm connecting with an intelligent being.

WOMAN: Science has been tantalized for years at the prospect of talking to the most intelligent creatures on earth, which may not be human beings.

MAN 1: A small group of scientists is determined to see if humans and dolphins can learn to talk to each other.

MAN 2: We keep spending billions of dollars, we're sending signals up into the sky, and we have a species here that can conceivably be more intelligent than we are.

DR. JOHN POTTER: Dolphins can understand how to manipulate situations, how to relate to people, how to create informatively out of their own imagination. It sometimes amazes me that the only language which has been extensively taught to dolphins is a version of American Sign Language, which of course you use your hands. Right? So you have all these wonderful signals, and people use their hands to give messages dolphins. And this, somehow, kind of misses the point because dolphins don't have hands. So this is inherently, a very one way process. And it's this anthropomorphic, 'we have something to teach them or control them,' and perhaps we ought to be looking at what they can give to us.