Man’s best friend

“Project Nim’’ chronicles Nim’s existence during and after the failed experiment.

Nim’s full name was Nim Chimpsky, a playful version of Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor who’s one of the fathers of modern linguistics.

“They had no idea what they were doing. They misinterpreted Nim’s aggression. He never bit me once,’’ said Ingersoll, 57, who spent nine years with Nim over two different periods, about those involved in the experiment. “They thought they could train animals to think the way we do. Bats don’t think like humans because they’re bats. They process information like bats. You can’t domesticate wild animals. Attacks are going to happen eventually. It’s just our arrogance.’’

“Bob is a genuinely wonderful human being, and he emerges as the true hero of the story,’’ said Simon Chinn, producer of the film. “He has a big personality and a very big heart. He is someone who takes on causes and fights very hard for them.’’

Ingersoll, a pot-smoking Deadhead with shoulder-length silver hair, now lives in San Francisco with his second wife, Belle. In the mid-’70s, while an undergraduate psychology major at the University of Oklahoma, also located in Norman, he got the chance to spend time at the IPS with a few of the 40-odd chimps there. He immediately displayed an easy bond with them. Over time, says Ingersoll, owner Bill Lemmon was impressed enough to give him a key to the cages. “My life was changed, but I didn’t know it.’’

Despite his life out West, Ingersoll is all Boston. He was born in the Chelsea Naval Hospital, lived in Roxbury as a kid, and hung out with his friends in Fields Corner. Then he banged around the world, from Turkey to Japan and North Carolina, as a military brat - his father was a career enlisted man in the Air Force. He and Belle stay with his godmother in Quincy whenever he’s in town, He lives and dies for the Red Sox.