Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or woman
But who is that on the other side of you?
~ TS Eliot, The Waste Land
There is, it seems, a common experience that happens to people who confront life at its extremes, and strange as it may sound, given the cruel hardship they endure to reach that place, it is something wonderful. This radical notion that an unseen presence has played a role in the success or survival of people who have reached the limits of human endurance is based on the extraordinary testimony of scores of people who have emerged alive from extreme environments. To a man or woman, they report that at a critical point they were joined by an additional, unexplained friend who lent them the power to overcome the most dire circumstances. There is a name for the phenomenon: it's called the Third Man Factor.
When asked about “the third who walks always beside you” in The Waste Land, T S Eliot apparently referenced something he had read in Ernest Shackleton's journals, wherein the polar explorer admitted to a “felt presence”; a shadowy guide who led his doomed group to safety ("I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.") Using poetic license, and perhaps a faulty memory, Eliot changed Shackleton's fourth man to a “third”, giving a name to a phenomenon that is evidently not as uncommon as one might suspect. Having had a similar experience himself as a child, when author John Geiger decided to look for a compilation of such stories, he realised that none existed and therefore assembled them here in The Third Man Factor. This book contains dozens of stories of people at the very limits of survival who found themselves helped to safety by such a “third man”, and in addition to these fascinating tales, Geiger looks for scientific explanations for the phenomenon:
Drawn from all these examples are vital clues of the five basic rules that govern the Third Man's appearance and invest the experience with meaning. These rules are the pathology of boredom, the principle of multiple triggers, the widow effect, the muse factor, and the power of the savior. Together, they help to explain the onset of the Third Man Factor. But they are causal in nature; they do not explain his origins or where the power comes from. Over the years, various theories have been proposed to explain the Third Man, and running concurrently with these, interspersed among the chapters of the book, are accounts of the search for an explanation. These attempts at understanding are themselves a record of man's changing conception of himself. They begin with the guardian angel, followed by the sensed presence and the shadow person. As clerics and then psychologists, and finally neurologists, theorized about the phenomenon, the trend has been a gradual reduction from the outside in, from God, to the mind, to the brain.
From Charles Lindbergh reporting that a shadowy figure helped him during his solo trans-Atlantic airplane flight in 1927 to Ron DiFrancesco – the last person to escape the Twin Towers alive on 9/11, who believes a guardian angel led him through the flame-filled staircase to safety – Geiger quotes the famous and the unknown, making a compelling case that there is a survival benefit to being able to project an imaginary helper outside of oneself in Extreme and Unusual Environments (EUE). There are many stories from polar explorers, mountain climbers, solo sailors and other adventurers – which begs the notion that this experience is more likely to happen to those people who are most open to novel experiences – but there are also stories from those (escaped prisoners of war, shipwreck or terrorist attack survivors) who unwittingly find themselves in extreme survival situations and who nonetheless credit outside forces for leading them to safety. Tracing the explanations for the phenomenon, Geiger references William James (brother of Henry) who, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, placed such encounters "squarely in the realm of religious, if not specifically angelic, experience” and Julian Jaynes, whose controversial theory of the bicameral mind seems to say that it was only a few thousand years ago (at around the same time we became literate) that humans began to recognise that our own thoughts spring from our own minds (and aren't gods or spirits outside ourselves telling us what to do) and that extreme stress can cause people to revert to this pre-sentient state. Geiger ties in phantom limb theory, children's imaginary friends, sleep paralysis, schizophrenia, and Michael Persinger's “god machine”; there seems to be no end to the ways in which we humans project presences outside ourselves. What makes the Third Man Factor so unique, however, is how benevolent and helpful these presences are; how integral a role they play in extreme survival situations, and that makes for some great stories.
The Third Man represents a real and potent force for survival, and the ability to access this power is a factor, perhaps the most important factor, in determining who will succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds, and who will not.
In the end, I was fascinated by both the survival stories and the evolving science that attempts to explain the phenomenon – this is certainly a quick and entertaining read. I see other reviewers saying that the stories felt too repetitive – another polar explorer, yet another mountain climber – but it all worked for me; if Geiger was attempting to collect as many stories of the third man factor into one book as he could, that's exactly what he achieved.
