The Third Man Factor (John Geiger)

The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible
John Geiger
Hachette Books
Nonfiction, Psychology/Sociology/Survival
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: A scuba diver in a deep cave loses track of her guideline... only to sense a presence that helps keep her calm until she can escape. An injured mountain climber, lost in bad weather, is tempted to give up, until someone who could not possibly be there urges them onward toward rescue. A sailor attempting a solo circumnavigation senses and even sees and hears a stranger aboard their ship, helping them through rough weather. An explorer lost in hostile jungle terrain follows a phantom figure to safety. A man in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks feels a presence just behind him, guiding him to safety before the towers collapse.
It sounds like the stuff of fiction, but these and other encounters like them are recorded thousands of times and more: people in high-stress, emergency situations and survival circumstances who sense or even see a phantom person, an entity that sometimes just watches and sometimes actively seems to offer advice or assistance. The figure can be a simple sensation of an unseen presence, a figure lacking features, an associate or loved one, or even a complete stranger. Even famed explorers like Shackleton experienced this, though many hide encounters for years or decades to avoid ridicule. The "Third Man Factor" is a real phenomenon, for all that nobody seems quite sure what the cause or trigger is. Author John Geiger relates several stories of Third Man encounters, along with studies and theories on their nature, from spiritual guides to evolutionary survival tactics to neural misfirings.

REVIEW: I've heard a few mentions of Third Man-like experiences in other survival stories, but this book is the first I've read dedicated solely to the phenomenon, which often falls into a gray area between spiritual or religious beliefs and neurochemistry. Actually studying it in action is difficult to impossible, given that it generally takes extreme situations to trigger, though some progress has been made on simulating similar experiences in lab settings. There's also some indication that it is related to the sense of a presence during sleep paralysis episodes and "imaginary friends" generated in childhood, and also possibly the misplaced sense of self that can also be seen in out-of-body experiences and "phantom limb" feelings in amputees; indeed, more than one person reporting their encounters seems to realize at some point that the "other" is an extension of themselves. Unlike delusional episodes or hallucinations, the people experiencing the Third Man often know that the "other" cannot possibly be there in truth, but the presence can still sometimes mean the difference between life and death in a very literal sense. "Third Men" (sometimes manifesting as female, or of undetermined gender) may well be an extreme survival tactic concocted by our social ape brains, for all that they sometimes seem like inert entities or even, rarely, vaguely malevolent (as in the "sleep paralysis demons" some report); just the sense of not being alone can help one rally in the face of impossible odds. The stories Geiger relates can occasionally bleed together (how many mountaineering disasters can a reader be expected to keep straight?), and sometimes the Third Man entity/experience involved seems more tangential than instrumental to helping the victims pull themselves together and get out of trouble, but overall it's a decently interesting look at an unusual psychological phenomenon.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl With No Name (Marina Chapman et al.) - My Review
Nation (Terry Pratchett) - My Review
Lost in Shangri-La (Mitchell Zuckoff) - My Review