Point Loma enters the novel as a specific location in San Diego tied to allegations of secret U.S. Navy experiments on dolphins. Its significance lies in the gap between what the available records appear to show and what can be established: it is presented as the suspected site of a classified program, not as the setting of a directly witnessed experiment.

Location and Identification

Leon Anawak locates the alleged experiments in Point Loma, San Diego, while confronting Jack Greywolf about his naval service. He cites files from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego and explains that it succeeded the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, also of Point Loma. In Anawak’s account, the institutional trail connects the San Diego research apparatus to the earlier naval command associated with the location.

The Alleged Dolphin Experiments

Anawak’s suspicion draws on the history of military interest in dolphin brains, echolocation, communication, and training. He notes that naval interest intensified around the time of the first Gulf War and that Greywolf had been stationed in Point Loma. Greywolf had left the service as a lieutenant responsible for two of the Navy’s four dolphin fleets, MK6 and MK7. Anawak uses these details to challenge Greywolf’s account of his departure and to press him about experiments he believes took place at the site.

The location also gains a disturbing possible association through a report Anawak finds in Earth Island Journal. It recounts the deaths of sixteen dolphins washed ashore in the French Mediterranean in the early 1990s, each with a similar fist-sized wound beneath the neck. The article links the deaths only by suggestion to a rumored classified U.S. Navy experimental program conducted around the same period; the experiments were said to have failed, after which those involved concealed the program. Point Loma is therefore connected to the incident through Anawak’s investigation and the suspected program, rather than through evidence that the dolphins were injured there.

Narrative Significance

Point Loma anchors a broad suspicion in a concrete institutional geography. Anawak moves from public information about marine-mammal research to files, military command structures, and Greywolf’s service history, trying to establish what official accounts leave obscure. Yet the evidence remains qualified: the journal reports a rumor, and Anawak’s accusation is an investigative inference. The place matters as the alleged site where military research on animal minds may have crossed into secret experimentation, while the novel preserves uncertainty about what precisely occurred.