Michel Siffre

Michel Siffre (born 3 January 1939) is a French underground explorer, adventurer and scientist. He was born in Nice, where he spent his childhood. At just 10 years of age he explored the Imperial Cave Park, and discovered a passion for caving.

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In his youth he became interested in the space race and decided to find a way to contribute. Imagining situations faced by astronauts noticed that some of them could play in a deep cave, that motivated him to start his experiments.

The experience of time, two months cloistered in the abyss of Scarasson without time cues on a glacier, from July 1962.[1] 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.[2]

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.