From NPR: Koko The Gorilla Dies

Koko was cool, I first heard about her story in school, from a Scholastic news magazine we got in class. Interesting story, I think the whole class liked it, and I saw it as a stepping point to talking with animals, and hope we'd be able to talk to all of them!

There was an exercise to make up an animal language, and a story about aliens coming to conquer the world, and they captured an earthling for study, then concluded the people of earth were not intelligent enough to be their slaves, and moved on. The twist on that little sci-fi story was that the aliens had picked up and studied an ape.

I hadn't known that Captain Kirk had gone to see Koko, but there's some good dialog with Robin Williams after he did.

Boomer