The mystery of the Third Man
It was something that a local guide said ‘never happens’ in that part of the world. At 4am one morning, a thunderstorm hit with breathtaking fury.
Lightning rained down on our team of archaeologists and historians encamped on Marble Island, off the northwest coast of Hudson Bay, Canada. As the interval between flash and thunderclap practically disappeared, everyone began collapsing their tents, some of which had been unwisely propped up with rebar, for fear that they would be struck.
When the storm subsided, team members began to emerge, ashen-faced, knees knocking together. ‘Someone’s not happy that we’re here,’ quipped one. I took that to be a reference to something an Inuit elder had said before we boarded a fishing yawl in the closest community, Rankin Inlet, and began our expedition to Marble Island: ‘You must crawl.’
Inuit tradition requires visitors to Marble Island to crawl up its rocky beaches on elbows and knees, to honour – or assuage – unquiet spirits. We had respected that tradition, but the freak storm did leave the impression that we were unwanted intruders. The atmosphere was set for another unusual event.
We were experiencing the usual inventory of Arctic plagues – clouds of mosquitoes, sleet, bouts of hypothermia and marauding polar bears. I was in my tent, and had been for hours, shivering almost rhythmically, undoubtedly hypothermic, unable to get dry or warm on the sodden ground. I then experienced a psychological shift of perspective. I suddenly saw the scene from a different, impossible angle, removed from myself. I thought I was losing it, except that I felt better. I wasn’t shivering – he was.
Unseen being
It was my experience on Marble Island that piqued my interest in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 encounter with an unseen presence on the British possession of South Georgia. It came at the end of his harrowing escape from Antarctica after his ship, Endurance, was trapped and crushed by the ice. Shackleton and two other men all had the sense that they were joined by an unseen being, someone or something Shackleton referred to as a ‘Divine Companion’.
He included mention of it in his famous narrative South: ‘I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.’
TS Eliot seized on the account of a presence on a polar expedition for The Waste Land, arguably the most famous English-language poem of the 20th century. In the poem, he asked: ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together…’ This is the origin of the name for the phenomenon, the Third Man Factor, or sometimes the Third Man Syndrome.
When I began to investigate Shackleton’s report of an incorporeal being, I quickly began to find others. The legendary climber Frank Smythe wrote famously of sharing his Kendal mint cake with an unseen companion on Mount Everest in June 1933 (see Mint cake on Mount Everest). ‘Strange,’ wrote Maurice Wilson, an Englishman who perished on Everest on 1934, in one of his final diary entries, ‘but I feel that there is somebody with me in tent all the time.’ And Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl repeatedly found himself ‘in the act of turning around to address my [non-existent] companion’ after being separated from his climbing partner on Nanga Parbat.
It’s even more common today than during Shackleton’s and Smythe’s time. I have spent the past five years pursuing the Third Man. In the process, I have documented scores of example, among them Britons Stephen Venables on Everest, Robert Swan in Antarctica and Bill King while in the Drake Passage. The total number is now into the low hundreds, each very much like the other: a presence, to some an‘angel’, a Third Man, joined them during their extreme struggles, a being who, in the words of the legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner, ‘leads you out of the impossible’.
They have occurred on every continent and on all the world’s oceans. I’ve even found a report from space. Not a few, then, but many, and not all of them explorers, either. Escaped prisoners of war, Vietnamese boat people, survivors of mine and building collapses, and perhaps most striking, the case of Ron DiFrancesco, a money market trader, who was helped by a Third Man during his escape from the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.
DiFrancesco was trapped in a smoke-filled staircase in the midst of the impact zone. People looked at him with panic in their eyes. Some cried. Others were collapsed on the floor, apparently unconscious. Then he felt a presence, and a voice encouraged him on. He had the sensation that ‘somebody lifted me up’. He felt that he was being guided: ‘I was led to the stairs. I don’t think something grabbed my hand, but I was definitely led.’ He saw a pinhole of light and fought his way down, through debris that obstructed his way, through smoke and flames.
DiFrancesco was the last person out of the South Tower before it collapsed. He said he would not have survived without this intervention. In his case, as with the rest, the incorporeal being presented itself as a benevolent companion, offering hope, encouragement and guidance, not at all the disordering experience you might expect to result from hallucinations produced by over-stressed minds.
Still out there
Despite all of the eyewitness accounts I collected, the object of my search, the Third Man, remained elusive. The Australian climber Greg Child said that trying to solve the mystery of the Third Man is like a ‘detective stalking the invisible man; there is no fingerprint, no solid evidence at all. The clues lie deep within us.’ But since Child said that, a series of scholarly studies have produced solid evidence. The Third Man has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention, but recent neurological research suggests something else.
A presence (called a ‘shadow person’) was accidentally evoked in a clinical setting by Swiss neurologists when they used electrical stimulation to probe the brain of an epileptic patient, looking for evidence of organic brain damage. It was a presence, an unseen being felt by the patient to be close at hand. But it was not the Third Man. Its most important feature, its powerful beneficence, that critical attribute that has helped people to survive and transcend extreme conditions, was missing.
Make no mistake, however, the Third Man walks beside us. As the New Zealand explorer Peter Hillary wrote of his own experience with the phenomenon in Antarctica, ‘Oh yes. They’re still out there.’
August 2009
Lightning rained down on our team of archaeologists and historians encamped on Marble Island, off the northwest coast of Hudson Bay, Canada. As the interval between flash and thunderclap practically disappeared, everyone began collapsing their tents, some of which had been unwisely propped up with rebar, for fear that they would be struck.
When the storm subsided, team members began to emerge, ashen-faced, knees knocking together. ‘Someone’s not happy that we’re here,’ quipped one. I took that to be a reference to something an Inuit elder had said before we boarded a fishing yawl in the closest community, Rankin Inlet, and began our expedition to Marble Island: ‘You must crawl.’
Inuit tradition requires visitors to Marble Island to crawl up its rocky beaches on elbows and knees, to honour – or assuage – unquiet spirits. We had respected that tradition, but the freak storm did leave the impression that we were unwanted intruders. The atmosphere was set for another unusual event.
We were experiencing the usual inventory of Arctic plagues – clouds of mosquitoes, sleet, bouts of hypothermia and marauding polar bears. I was in my tent, and had been for hours, shivering almost rhythmically, undoubtedly hypothermic, unable to get dry or warm on the sodden ground. I then experienced a psychological shift of perspective. I suddenly saw the scene from a different, impossible angle, removed from myself. I thought I was losing it, except that I felt better. I wasn’t shivering – he was.
Unseen being
It was my experience on Marble Island that piqued my interest in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 encounter with an unseen presence on the British possession of South Georgia. It came at the end of his harrowing escape from Antarctica after his ship, Endurance, was trapped and crushed by the ice. Shackleton and two other men all had the sense that they were joined by an unseen being, someone or something Shackleton referred to as a ‘Divine Companion’.
He included mention of it in his famous narrative South: ‘I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.’
TS Eliot seized on the account of a presence on a polar expedition for The Waste Land, arguably the most famous English-language poem of the 20th century. In the poem, he asked: ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together…’ This is the origin of the name for the phenomenon, the Third Man Factor, or sometimes the Third Man Syndrome.
When I began to investigate Shackleton’s report of an incorporeal being, I quickly began to find others. The legendary climber Frank Smythe wrote famously of sharing his Kendal mint cake with an unseen companion on Mount Everest in June 1933 (see Mint cake on Mount Everest). ‘Strange,’ wrote Maurice Wilson, an Englishman who perished on Everest on 1934, in one of his final diary entries, ‘but I feel that there is somebody with me in tent all the time.’ And Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl repeatedly found himself ‘in the act of turning around to address my [non-existent] companion’ after being separated from his climbing partner on Nanga Parbat.
It’s even more common today than during Shackleton’s and Smythe’s time. I have spent the past five years pursuing the Third Man. In the process, I have documented scores of example, among them Britons Stephen Venables on Everest, Robert Swan in Antarctica and Bill King while in the Drake Passage. The total number is now into the low hundreds, each very much like the other: a presence, to some an‘angel’, a Third Man, joined them during their extreme struggles, a being who, in the words of the legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner, ‘leads you out of the impossible’.
They have occurred on every continent and on all the world’s oceans. I’ve even found a report from space. Not a few, then, but many, and not all of them explorers, either. Escaped prisoners of war, Vietnamese boat people, survivors of mine and building collapses, and perhaps most striking, the case of Ron DiFrancesco, a money market trader, who was helped by a Third Man during his escape from the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.
DiFrancesco was trapped in a smoke-filled staircase in the midst of the impact zone. People looked at him with panic in their eyes. Some cried. Others were collapsed on the floor, apparently unconscious. Then he felt a presence, and a voice encouraged him on. He had the sensation that ‘somebody lifted me up’. He felt that he was being guided: ‘I was led to the stairs. I don’t think something grabbed my hand, but I was definitely led.’ He saw a pinhole of light and fought his way down, through debris that obstructed his way, through smoke and flames.
DiFrancesco was the last person out of the South Tower before it collapsed. He said he would not have survived without this intervention. In his case, as with the rest, the incorporeal being presented itself as a benevolent companion, offering hope, encouragement and guidance, not at all the disordering experience you might expect to result from hallucinations produced by over-stressed minds.
Still out there
Despite all of the eyewitness accounts I collected, the object of my search, the Third Man, remained elusive. The Australian climber Greg Child said that trying to solve the mystery of the Third Man is like a ‘detective stalking the invisible man; there is no fingerprint, no solid evidence at all. The clues lie deep within us.’ But since Child said that, a series of scholarly studies have produced solid evidence. The Third Man has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention, but recent neurological research suggests something else.
A presence (called a ‘shadow person’) was accidentally evoked in a clinical setting by Swiss neurologists when they used electrical stimulation to probe the brain of an epileptic patient, looking for evidence of organic brain damage. It was a presence, an unseen being felt by the patient to be close at hand. But it was not the Third Man. Its most important feature, its powerful beneficence, that critical attribute that has helped people to survive and transcend extreme conditions, was missing.
Make no mistake, however, the Third Man walks beside us. As the New Zealand explorer Peter Hillary wrote of his own experience with the phenomenon in Antarctica, ‘Oh yes. They’re still out there.’
August 2009
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