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- Over the past four years, we have extensively researched the remarkable life of the Calment family. They were well known in Arles, a town renowned for meticulous record-keeping. Although most of Mme Calment’s archives were reportedly destroyed at her request (7), in 2019 some photographs resurfaced thanks to her extended family, and others were discovered in old news reports and flea markets. In addition, 15 hours of recordings of her interviews were released by INSERM in January 2022 (12). With this wealth of material, it was possible to reconstruct much of her life in some detail. If she were genuine, one would expect it to become increasingly difficult to support the case for the identity switch as more evidence emerged, but instead we found ourselves constructing a remarkably detailed story of how and why Yvonne assumed her mother’s identity. Everything we observed was either consistent with the switch hypothesis or strengthened the case against her authenticity. The quantity of evidence we found was unusually high, so we have selected only the most important components for this report.
