The Third Man

In May 1916, three men crossed the interior of South Georgia Island on foot. They had been on the move with little sleep and less food for most of two days. Ernest Shackleton led. His captain Frank Worsley and his second officer Tom Crean walked behind. They were the survivors of the Endurance expedition. Eight hundred miles behind them, on Elephant Island, twenty-two men were waiting to be rescued. A hundred and fifty miles ahead, across mountains nobody had crossed, was the Stromness whaling station, where Shackleton intended to ask for a ship.

What they had not crossed was the interior. It had no maps. The three of them found the route as they went, climbing and descending in a continuous push because stopping would mean dying.

Three years after the journey was over, Shackleton published an account of it. In it he wrote a sentence that has been quoted often since. 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. Worsley said the same thing independently. So did Crean. None of the three had mentioned anything to the others during the crossing.

T.S. Eliot read Shackleton's account and put a line into The Waste Land in 1922. Who is the third who walks always beside you? He counted differently because of the imagery he was working with, but the source was Shackleton. The presence had a literary anchor from that point on, and a name.

It also had a pattern. Shackleton's was not an isolated report.

I. The Pattern

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone from New York to Paris. The flight took thirty-three hours. He had been awake for twenty-three hours before takeoff. Somewhere over the Atlantic, after roughly eighteen hours of continuous flying, he noticed he was not alone in the cabin. He wrote about it twenty-six years later, in his book about the flight. The cabin became filled, he said, with vaguely outlined human forms that passed through the fuselage walls, conversed with him, gave him reassurance, occasionally offered information. They were friendly. He did not write about them at the time. He kept it private for a quarter century.

In 1933, the British climber Frank Smythe attempted a solo summit of Everest. He climbed to roughly 28,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, which is well into the elevation at which the body begins to fail. He turned back about a thousand feet from the summit. He wrote later that for the entirety of the upper climb a companion was beside him. The presence was strong enough that at one point he broke his mint cake in half and offered the second half to it before realizing what he was doing.

In 1985, the British mountaineer Joe Simpson fell into a crevasse on Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes with a broken leg. His climbing partner, believing him dead, had already cut the rope and descended. Simpson crawled and dragged himself for three days back to base camp, alone, severely injured, in conditions that should have killed him. He has said since that he was not alone for the crawl. A voice spoke to him for most of it, in his own internal register but not his own voice, telling him when to keep moving and what to do next and where to put his weight. He wrote Touching the Void about the experience in 1988. He is not a believer. He has been at pains to say so. The voice was simply, factually, there.

In 2001, Ron DiFrancesco was on the eighty-fourth floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when the second plane hit. He was the last person known to escape from above the impact zone before the tower collapsed. He has described descending through smoke and debris on a stairwell where the air was unbreathable and the way was unclear. He has said that someone took his hand. He could not see them. The grip was specific. They led him through smoke he could not see through, around debris he could not see around, down to a floor from which he could be evacuated. He emerged into the plaza moments before the building came down.

These are five accounts spanning the twentieth century. They come from a polar explorer, a transatlantic pilot, a high-altitude mountaineer, an injured climber, and a financial analyst escaping a terror attack. The conditions differ. The phenomenology converges. There is, in each case, a felt presence of an unseen other, perceived as benevolent, sometimes providing specific guidance, arriving in extremis without invitation.

They are not the only five. The Canadian writer John Geiger collected more than a hundred well-documented cases in his 2009 book The Third Man Factor. The phenomenon has a substantial literature of its own across mountaineering memoirs, polar exploration narratives, lost-at-sea accounts, terminal-illness reporting, and post-9/11 testimony. The reports are consistent enough that any explanatory account has to grapple with the consistency.

II. What the Brain Does at the Edges

The materialist account is good. It is not complete, but it is good, and it does real work, and it should be given its due before anything else.

The first piece of it is that the human brain under extreme stress produces a recognizable phenomenology. Sustained exhaustion, hypothermia, hypoxia, isolation, monotonous stimuli, and the threat of imminent death all produce overlapping effects on cognition. The conditions narrow attention, dissolve the usual sense of self-boundary, and impair the integration between brain regions that ordinarily produces the seamless feeling of being a single coherent person.

The second piece is more specific. There is a region of the brain called the temporoparietal junction, the TPJ, that appears to be involved in the construction of the felt sense of self in space. When this region is disturbed, by stroke, by epilepsy, by direct electrical stimulation in surgical settings, or apparently by extreme physiological stress, people report a recognizable cluster of altered experiences. Out-of-body sensations. Doppelganger experiences. And, relevant here, the felt presence of someone standing nearby when no one is there.

The Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke, working at EPFL in Lausanne, has produced felt-presence experiences in laboratory conditions. In 2014 his group induced the experience in healthy volunteers using a robotic apparatus that produced a small temporal asynchrony between the participant's movements and a mechanical touch on their back. The presence appeared. It was experimentally generated, repeatable, and grounded in measurable brain physiology. The work was published in Current Biology.

The third piece is psychological. Adaptive dissociation, as several psychiatrists have proposed it, is a way of describing what the psyche may do under conditions in which the integrated self can no longer perform what survival requires. The psyche may split off a competent and benevolent companion that can provide what the conscious self can no longer access. The Third Man, on this view, is a part of the survivor's own mind, externalized and personified at exactly the moment when externalizing and personifying it would be most useful.

There is a fourth piece, more speculative but worth naming. Julian Jaynes argued in 1976 that human consciousness before roughly three thousand years ago was structured differently than ours, that what we now experience as our own thinking voice was once experienced as the voice of a god, externally located. He called this the bicameral mind. The strong form of the argument is contested and probably overstated. The underlying observation, that the felt locus of inner speech is not a fixed feature of human experience and may decompose under stress, has supporting evidence in the hallucination literature and in the inner-voice research that has followed.

Add the pieces together and you get a real account. The brain has machinery for the felt sense of self in space. That machinery can be disturbed. When it is, presences arise. The presence is generated by the same brain that perceives it, externalized because that is what externalization does, made benevolent because that is what an integrated psyche needs when the rest of itself is failing.

This is not a strawman. This is the best current account. It explains a great deal of the data and is supported by laboratory work that can produce the phenomenon on demand.

III. What the Account Cannot Quite Reach

There are details in the case literature that the materialist account explains less easily.

The first is the question of shared perception. In Shackleton's case, all three men perceived the fourth presence independently. None of them mentioned it during the crossing. Each reported it separately afterward, in writing, with the others' accounts confirming his own. If the felt presence is generated by the brain of the perceiver under stress, the question of how three brains under stress generate a coherent fourth presence that all three perceive is open. The materialist account can absorb this with sufficient elaboration. Shared stress, shared expectation, the contagiousness of suggestion. But it has to do more work than it would prefer, and the cases are not rare. Shared-presence reports also turn up in other expedition literature, in some lost-at-sea group accounts, and in a small subset of the 9/11 testimony.

The second is the question of specific information. In some cases the presence is reported to have provided guidance that the perceiver did not consciously have. DiFrancesco being led by a grip he could not see through smoke he could not see through. Smythe's reports of guidance on the upper Everest climb. Lindbergh receiving navigational reassurance during periods when he was severely fatigued and at risk of falling asleep. The materialist account holds that the unconscious mind, doing perceptual processing the conscious mind cannot, produces information and delivers it through the felt presence. This is plausible. It is also a substantial claim, and it does not fully account for cases where the specific information could not have come from the perceiver's own sensory access.

The third is the question of timing. In some cases the presence arrives before the duress is severe enough to plausibly induce the phenomenon. The presence is sometimes felt early in an expedition, when conditions are still good. It is sometimes felt by people who are not in physical extremis at all. Widowers in the weeks after a partner's death. Parents in the days after a child's death. Soldiers immediately after combat exposure but in safe environments. The materialist account works best for the high-stress cases. It works less well for the cases in which the brain has not yet been pushed to the conditions the account requires.

None of these gaps disproves the materialist account. The account remains the most parsimonious explanation we have for the bulk of the phenomenon. But the gaps are real. The account does not close completely. There is residue.

IV. Where the Evidence Leaves Us

The phenomenon is well-documented. The materialist account is good and partial. The residue is real and does not prove anything beyond what it is, which is a residue.

What you do with that residue is your business. Different intelligent people, looking at the same evidence, land in different places. Some conclude that the residue is the kind of thing further research will eventually close around, and the phenomenon will be fully explained as we learn more about how the brain produces felt presences. This is a defensible position. Others conclude that the residue is the kind of thing the materialist frame may not be the right tool for, and that a more complete account would have to include explanatory categories the materialist frame has good reasons to exclude. This is also a defensible position. The evidence as it currently stands does not force a choice.

One observation, offered not as conclusion but as something worth knowing.

The wisdom traditions across cultures and millennia have described encounters with felt presences under conditions that strip the everyday sense of self. Extreme physical duress. Sustained meditation. Fasting. Vision quests. The dying process. The dark night of the soul. The names the traditions give the presence are many: the angel, the bodhisattva, the daimon, the Holy Spirit, the guide, the friend. Whether these traditions are describing what the survivors describe is an open question. The phenomenologies overlap. The conditions under which the encounters occur overlap. Whether the two bodies of testimony are pointing at the same territory or at superficially similar territories that share nothing underneath is, again, a question the evidence does not settle.

The strongest claim worth making about the convergence is that it is not nothing. Two enormous bodies of human testimony, accumulated independently across very different cultures and conditions, describe something with overlapping features under overlapping circumstances. That this is the case is itself a piece of evidence. What kind of evidence it is, whether it is cultural artifact, convergent psychological universal, or pointer to something real, is exactly the question the literature, taken together, does not answer.

The Third Man walks. There is his name from Shackleton and Eliot. There are his fingerprints across a century of testimony. There is laboratory evidence for some of how he can be produced. There is a residue of cases the best current account does not fully close around.

You sit with that. So do I.

A related dispatch. Dispatch 10: The Cosmic Giggle arrives at a neighboring threshold from the opposite direction — what is revealed when the gripping mind has exhausted itself, there through humor rather than duress.