- Source: Michel Siffre
Michel Augustin Francis Siffre (3 January 1939 – 25 August 2024) was a French underground explorer, adventurer and scientist.
Life and career
Siffre was born in Nice, where he spent his childhood. He received a postgraduate degree at the Sorbonne six months after completing his baccalauréat. He founded the French Institute of Speleology (Institut français de spéléologie) in 1962 (not to be confused with the French Federation of Speleology).
Inspired by the space race, he explored how humans experience time by spending two months cloistered 130 meters below the surface in the abyss of Scarasson (Punta Marguareis) without time cues on a glacier, from July 1962. He then organized several similar underground experiments for other speleologists. In 1972, Siffre went back underground for a six-month stay in a cave in Texas. He found that without time cues, several people including himself adjusted to a 48-hour rather than a 24-hour cycle. The notes of his experiments were used by NASA. Several astronauts reported experiences similar to those experienced in underground experiments such as loss of short-term memory to being isolated from external time references. His final excursion in a cave ran from November 1999 to February 2000; he celebrated the New Year there, but missed the actual date by four days.
Siffre died from pneumonia in Nice on 25 August 2024, at the age of 85.
Publications
Hors du temps. L'expérience du 16 juillet 1962 au fond du gouffre de Scarasson par celui qui l'a vécue, Julliard, 1963
Des merveilles sous la terre, Hachette, cop. 1976
Stalactites, stalagmites, cop. 1984
L'or des gouffres: découvertes dans les jungles mayas, Flammarion, 1979
Dans les abîmes de la terre, Flammarion, 1975
La France des grottes et cavernes, Privat, 1999
A la recherche de l'art des cavernes du pays Maya, A. Lefeuvre, 1979
Découvertes dans les grottes mayas, Arthaud, 1993
Beyond Time, Translated by Herma Briffault, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964
Notes and references
See also
Chronobiology
Circadian rhythm
Maurizio Montalbini
= Bibliography
=Schut, Une histoire culturelle de la spéléologie, L’Harmattan.