Known for his experiments in voluntary confinement, Michel Siffre died at the age of 85 on Saturday, August 24. In 1999, the Frenchman made his last journey to the center of the Earth in the Clamouse cave in Hérault, to study the sleep cycle alone.
Adventurer, explorer, speleologist? Hard to say, Michel Siffre was probably all three at once. The Frenchman had been a pioneer in his field during his life, being the first to conduct underground confinement experiments for the science of the human body.
Michel Siffre became known in 1962. He decided to lock himself in an Italian cave, and kept as his only link with the outside world a telephone line. Besides, no clock or watch. His desire was to study the biological rhythm of sleep, by depriving himself of outside light in order to understand its influence on the brain and the body.
Coming out of his cave on September 14, exhausted by his adventure, Michel Siffre declared “I was convinced it was August 20th.”
In 1972, Michel Siffre repeated the experiment, this time for more than 6 months in a cave in the United States, all alone. The experiment was funded by NASA, and the speleologist became known to the world scientific community for the conclusions of his experiments.
His last experiment, aimed at studying “the effect of aging on the biological rhythm”, took place in 1999, in the Clamouse cave in Hérault. After a 69-day confinement, 300 people came to wait for him when he was released. Michel Siffre had chosen this cave that he knew well, in which he wanted “to be the only man on the planet not to experience the transition to the year 2000”.
