The Third Man Factor

John Geiger, Credit: Daniel J. Catt

By Judi Ketteler

On September 11, 2001, Ron DiFrancesco went to work at Euro Brokers, a financial trading firm on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, like it was any other day. He was at his desk when the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. A friend called and told him to get out. He headed toward the elevators when the second plane hit his tower at 9:03 a.m. That left the stairs as the only way out. In all the commotion, he quickly got stuck on a smoke-filled landing at the 80th floor, blocked by a collapsed wall. People around him were panicking, gasping for air and crouching low to breathe. DiFrancesco lay down on the concrete floor for a minute, feeling hopeless. Then he heard a voice telling him to get up.

The voice didn't belong to any of the people around him, but it was as real as any human voice to DiFrancesco. A strong presence of someone unseen was guiding him, directing him to another stairwell, telling him to break through the flames. He essentially ran into the fire to escape it, and though flames surrounded him as he made his way down three stories, he did find a clear path on the 76th floor and was able to escape just as the building was coming down. He was the last person out of the South Tower before it collapsed at 9:59 a.m.

This is one of hundreds of accounts (both verbal and written) of being aided by an invisible guardian, coined in a T.S. Eliot poem as the third man, explored in John Geiger's new book, "The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible." Geiger researched this phenomenon -- when someone seems trapped in a life-or-death situation, only to be led to safety by a presence that feels as real as the danger -- for six years, combing through books, newspaper accounts, personal journals and psychological research, as well as interviewing people who have been aided by an unseen helper.

In an interview with AOL Health, Geiger explores the "third man" phenomenon that many adventurers, as well as people in the wrong place at the wrong time, have described. He explains that, while these occurrences may sound like a good old-fashioned "invisible friend," the "third man" is anything but child's play or make-believe.

Watch a video interview with Ron DiFrancesco below.


AOL Health: Have you ever experienced this phenomenon?

John Geiger: When I was 7, I had an altercation with a rattlesnake [while hiking] in southern Alberta [Canada]. My father was ahead of me as I was coming up a steep embankment. I came face to face with this rattlesnake, and it was very terrifying, as you can imagine. I actually had a sense of duality, as if I could see the scene unfold. There seemed to be two of me -- one facing the rattlesnake and one kind of watching from a distance. In an instant, my father grabbed me and lifted me out of danger, and it's as if I saw it happen. To this day, I don't know whether or not it was just an overactive child's imagination or whether it was a real mental experience that I had, but it certainly made me interested in the ways we mentally cope with extremely stressful situations. Then, when I came across Sir Ernest Shackleton's experiences in Antarctica with a "third man," [when on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1916, the crew became stranded and was reportedly guided by an unseen force] I was very interested and began looking for other examples. I very quickly found scores of them.

AOL Health: How does science explain this seeming "guardian angel" experience?

Geiger: What's interesting to me is that there has been so little study of this phenomenon. When you think about the significance of this, that people in their greatest hour of need can turn and find help and escape situations that are extremely difficult, it's a beautiful idea. It strikes me as astonishing that there hasn't been more scholarly work done in this area. Having said that, there have been some notable studies, which started in the 1950s with Macdonald Critchley, a British neurologist who first seriously looked at the phenomenon of the third man. He looked at wartime shipwreck survivors, and he felt that the origins of the third man lay not outside the body, but within -- a neurological response brought on by extreme stress. And more recently, there have been other neurological studies. So it is an area that is gradually being recognized by the scientific community as a subject of interest.

There are two major explanations as to what is happening. One is that it's a psychological response to extreme stress and that people have an inner resource they can call upon, and that is a sense that there is another being. They have a companion when they need one, which acts as a coping mechanism and allows them to overcome these apparently insurmountable obstacles.

The other is from very recent work in Switzerland that suggests that by using an electrical stimulus in the brain, some neurologists were able to evoke a sense of a presence in a clinical setting. So by simply stimulating part of the brain, they were able to create a sensation for a patient that there was another being beside her, when objectively there was no one there. Now, what was interesting about that is it did not have the same overwhelmingly benevolent and beneficial powers for her. It was simply an odd, slightly unusual kind of sensation.

AOL Health: Do you find many people who write these experiences off as anecdotal or made up?

Geiger: There are so many examples in the book because I didn't want to restrict it to a handful of cases because then a critic would be able to dismiss it. But here, we have scores of examples over time and in all sorts of different environments. Nobody is questioning whether the experience is real. It's accepted and I think the book makes an overwhelming case that this a common experience for human beings.

AOL Health: Why do some people experience this, but not others? Did you struggle with understanding the seemingly random occurrence?

Geiger: Yes, absolutely, and there are a number of considerations. Some people are just more open to this experience. Some people are just more willing to admit they are having this kind of experience, and are prepared to pay attention to it. Other people might not take the advice: They block it out and think, "This is crazy" and that they are obviously coming apart at the seams and dismiss it as a hallucination. Essentially, the third man requires a willing partner. You can't benefit if you are unwilling to take the directions and guidance and the suggestions that are provided and admit that you are having this experience.

Next: The Conditions Under Which the Third Man Appears and How to Use It in Your Every Day Life



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