The Third Man Factor | The In-Between #01

Imagine you've been fighting for hours just to stay alive. Maybe you're trapped inside a burning building, alone at sea in the middle of a violent storm, or stranded somewhere so remote you have no idea whether anyone is coming to find you. You're exhausted, frightened, and starting to wonder if you can keep going at all. And then someone appears. At first, there may be nothing obviously strange about it. The person in trouble might talk to this stranger, listen to them, or simply accept the enormous relief of suddenly not being alone. In some accounts, the stranger seems to know exactly what needs to happen next and actually helps them survive. It's only later, when the danger has passed or the person simply disappears, that they're forced to confront something impossible. There was never anybody else with them. Experiences like this have turned up in some of the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Sometimes people actually see another person as real as you or me. Sometimes they hear a voice, and sometimes they simply become certain that someone is standing or walking beside them. What makes these stories especially strange is that this mysterious presence tends to show up at exactly the moment they're running out of options and leads them out of danger. It's called the third man factor. And there are some genuinely fascinating scientific theories about what causes it, including the possibility that it's something the brain actually does to help us survive. But once you hear what some of these people went through, it's not hard to understand why so many of them came away believing that something or someone had really been there. Welcome to the in-between. This is something new I'm trying here at the Real Unreal. Full episodes come out every other Monday, but there are so many strange phenomena and unexplained experiences out there that I don't necessarily need a full-length episode to do them justice. So the in-between gives us a chance to dig into some of those stories in the weeks in between. And the third man factor felt like the perfect place to start because once you start looking into it, you find versions of the same experience happening all over the world under completely different circumstances. It's been reported by sailors, aviators, polar explorers, divers, disaster survivors, even astronauts. What connects these people isn't where they were, it's what's happening to them. They were under extreme physical or psychological stress, and somehow they stopped being alone. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Ron DiFrancesco was at his desk at Eurobrokers, a trading firm on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. When the first plane hit the North Tower, an announcement went out over the intercom telling everyone in his building it was secure and there was no need to evacuate. DiFrancesco called his wife to tell her he was fine and planned to stay at his desk. Then a friend talked him into leaving, anyways. He never made it to the lobby. When United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, DiFrancesco was above the impact zone and his route down was blocked by smoke and collapsed debris. At one point, he used a sheared off piece of sheetrock as a shield just to push through the heat. Surrounded by people struggling to breathe, he eventually collapsed onto the concrete floor, beginning to believe there was no way out. And then he heard somebody, a man's voice calling his name, telling him to get up. He didn't recognize it as belonging to anybody around him, but along with the voice came an overwhelming sense that someone else was there, guiding him. So he listened. The presence directed him towards another stairwell and pushed him forward, even when the route ahead seemed to lead straight through fire. DiFrancesco later described feeling absolutely certain that he was being led by someone. Eventually, he broke through into a clear lit stairwell several floors down and made it outside shortly before the South Tower collapsed. He was burned and had inhaled a dangerous amount of smoke, and he was unconscious by the time he reached the hospital, but he survived. According to the official 9-11 Commission report, he was one of only four people to escape the building from above the 81st floor, the point of impact. His story would later become one of the central accounts in John Geiger's book on the Third Man Factor. The experience itself was known long before it had a name, but one of its most famous accounts comes from the explorer Ernest Shackleton. In 1916, Shackleton and his crew were trying to survive the disastrous endurance expedition. Their ship had gotten trapped in the Antarctic park ice and was eventually crushed. After months of surviving on drifting ice, the men reached Elephant Island, but there was almost no chance anyone would find them there. So Shackleton and five others climbed into a 22-foot lifeboat and sailed roughly 800 miles across the southern ocean to South Georgia. Somehow they made it. Unfortunately, they'd landed on the wrong side of the island. The whaling stations where they could get help were on the opposite side of the coast, which they were separated from by mountains and glaciers. So Shackleton chose Frank Worsley and Tom Crean to make the crossing with him. These men were already exhausted before they even started. They'd endured months of cold, hunger, and physical strain. And now they spent roughly 36 hours crossing the island with almost no proper climbing equipment. Somewhere in that journey, Shackleton began to feel that somebody else was traveling with him. There were three men on the journey, but to Shackleton, there were four. What makes the story especially interesting is that he apparently didn't say anything to the others while it was happening. Later, Worsley admitted that he felt another person accompanying them too, and Crean acknowledged experiencing the same thing. All three men, independently, felt the presence of a fourth. Shackleton eventually wrote about the experience, and T.S. Elliott later alluded to the mysterious extra traveler in the wasteland. That reference is where we get the name we still use today, the third man factor, which is slightly ridiculous considering Shackleton technically had a fourth man, but here we are. Shackleton's experience is probably the classic version of the phenomenon. Nobody appeared in front of him. He simply knew somebody else was there. But other people have experienced something a lot more tangible. In 1895, the sailor Joshua Slocum set out to do something nobody had ever done before: sail around the world alone. He was aboard a small sloop called the Spray when he made a rookie mistake. He gorged himself on plums and cheese and came down with agonizing stomach cramps just as a storm was blowing in. When he came to, his ship was pitching wildly in heavy seas. He dragged himself onto the deck to try to save her and found a bearded stranger already standing at the helm, dressed like a sailor from another century entirely. The man introduced himself, quite calmly, as the pilot of the Pinta, one of Columbus's ships, and told Slocum he hadn't come to hurt him. He'd come to steer. Slocum passed out again. When he woke, the storm had eased, and the spray had somehow held her course the whole time. There was no sailor aboard. Slocum was still alone, but he remained convinced someone had taken the wheel while he was sick, and he wrote about the mysterious visitor in his account of the voyage. Now, obviously, there are plenty of rational explanations available here. Slocum was violently ill, exhausted, and alone on a boat while being thrown around by a storm, which is not exactly an ideal environment for reliable perception. But what interests me is what his brain apparently chose to create. It didn't give him some random monster standing in the cabin. It gave a sixth sailor another sailor. And not just any sailor, but specifically somebody who knew how to handle a boat when Slocum couldn't. Now there's another account I wanted to include because of one tiny detail that tells you just how convincing these experiences can be. In 1933, the British mountaineer Frank Smythe was attempting to climb Mount Everest. He eventually continued alone, reaching more than 28,000 feet before deciding it was too dangerous to go any farther. He was exhausted and operating in the so-called death zone, where the lack of oxygen can seriously impair the brain, and at some point he became completely comfortable with the idea that someone else was climbing right beside him. He couldn't actually see this person, but the companion felt so real that when Smythe stopped to eat a piece of cake, he instinctively broke it in two, kept one half, and reached out to hand the other to his companion. Only then did he remember there was nobody there. I find that detail fascinating because it tells us this wasn't Smythe wondering whether he sensed something nearby. For some stretch of time, the other person had become a completely ordinary part of his reality. He had food, there were two of them, so he split it. In Smith's case, we have an especially obvious scientific explanation on hand. At that altitude, his brain was being starved of oxygen. But altitude can't explain Ron DiFrancesco in the World Trade Center. It can't explain Joshua Slocum at sea, and it can't explain Charles Lindbergh. When Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, one of his greatest threats wasn't mechanical failure. It was sleep. He'd already been awake for hours before he even took off, and the flight to Paris lasted more than 33 hours. As it wore on, he became desperately sleep-deprived, and somewhere over the Atlantic, he began experiencing other people inside the cockpit of the spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh described vague, almost transparent figures traveling with him in the plane. He didn't experience them as threatening, quite the opposite. They were reassuring. He felt they spoke with him and offered advice about the flight, and for part of that journey, Lindbergh, who was unquestionably flying alone across the Atlantic, experienced himself as having company during the trip. So we've got an office worker trapped inside the World Trade Center, a sailor incapacitated during a storm, a climber at extreme altitude, and a pilot fighting to stay awake over open ocean, and three polar explorers pushing themselves across an uncharted frozen island. Completely different environments, completely different kinds of danger. But something remarkably similar happens in every one of them. Another person enters the experience. So what is actually happening during these experiences? Well, the obvious answer is that these are hallucinations, and in some cases, that may be exactly what they are. Severe sleep deprivation can produce hallucinations, hypoxia at extreme altitude can profoundly affect perception. Hypothermia, dehydration, starvation, exhaustion, and prolonged isolation can all interfere with the way the brain processes what's happening around it. And in a lot of survival situations, several of those things are happening at once, but there's a recognizable pattern running through many third man accounts. The additional person is usually reassuring rather than frightening. They tend to appear during the most dangerous part of the crisis, and they frequently disappear the moment the person reaches safety. Most interestingly, the presence often seems to provide exactly what the person needs in that moment, whether that's encouragement, companionship, direction, or simply the will to keep going. Researchers use the broader term sensed presence for experiences where someone becomes convinced another being is nearby, despite having no normal sensory evidence that anyone is actually there. One possibility is that extreme stress disrupts the brain's normal ability to distinguish itself from the outside world, so that something generated internally can suddenly feel like it's coming from somewhere or someone else. Instead of experiencing your own thoughts that tell you to get up or that you need to move, you experience someone else telling you to get up. And that's where this gets really interesting to me because what looks like a malfunction may actually have some survival value. Human beings are profoundly social. So for most of our history, being alone in a dangerous situation was a terrible position to be in. Another person meant another pair of eyes, another set of hands, information, protection, or reassurance. So imagine what it would mean if, under extraordinary circumstances, the brain could somehow reproduce part of that benefit when nobody else was actually available. Ron DiFrancesco had collapsed inside a burning building and heard someone telling him to get up. Josh Slocum was too sick to control his boat and experienced another sailor taking over. Shackleton and his companions were pushing themselves beyond exhaustion and felt another traveler beside them. Frank Smythe was alone at extreme altitude and suddenly had a climbing partner. These are different circumstances every time, but in each case the presence filled a need. And I think it's really incredible because if the neurological explanation is correct, the third man's theory isn't interesting because the brain is failing. It's interesting because the brain may be desperately trying to help. When you're at the absolute edge of what you can tolerate and there's no one there to help you, your own mind may somehow create the experience of someone who can. And this is where the scientific explanation and the experience itself can exist side by side. We look at Frank Smythe and say he was oxygen deprived. We can look at Lindbergh and point to extreme sleep deprivation. And we can look at Slocum and say he was sick and exhausted. Those explanations are all completely reasonable. But imagine being the person experiencing it. You're not sitting there thinking my brain appears to be externalizing an internal cognitive process. There's a guy on your boat. There's somebody beside you on the mountain. There's a voice in a burning building telling you exactly where to go. For you, in that moment, someone is there. And some people remain convinced of that, even once they understand perfectly well that another person couldn't have physically been there. That's the part of the third man factor. I have trouble shaking. Because think about what these people are describing. Ron DiFrancesco didn't feel like his own brain was pep talking him. He felt led. Shackleton, Worsley, and Creon didn't compare notes and conclude that they all had a stress response at the same time. They came away certain that a fourth companion had walked beside them across a glacier. Frank Smythe broke his food in half for someone he couldn't even see. And if you asked any of them in the moment, none of them would have said, My mind is generating a coping mechanism. They would have said someone was there. Maybe it was a guardian angel or a spirit or something looking out for them, showing up in the moment that they needed it most, and slipping away the second they were safe. And I think that's a really beautiful thought, that none of us are ever quite as alone as we feel, even at the very edge of what we can survive. We don't know. And I mean that in the fullest sense of the phrase, not as a shrug, but because there is genuinely so much about consciousness and perception and whatever else might be out there that we don't understand yet. Human perception is the only way any of us ever experience reality in the first place. So whatever is actually happening in these moments, it's real enough and it's convincing enough that people have trusted these people with their lives. So I don't think the honest answer is to pick a side. I think it's to hold both possibilities at once, that this might be something looking out for us from outside of ourselves, and that it might be something our own minds are capable of that we're only beginning to understand. So you may be asking, what do I think? I don't know exactly what the third man factor is, and I don't think we need to force an answer. Maybe it's entirely neurological. And if it is, that's a really fascinating explanation of the experience, because that would mean somewhere inside of us maybe a survival response that most people will never know exists. You can go your entire life without encountering it until something happens that pushes you beyond what your mind and your body normally have to endure. I can also see why somebody who's actually experienced the third man might hear that explanation and think, no, you don't understand. Somebody was there. Or maybe there are still things about consciousness and human perception that we don't understand nearly as well as we think we do. Either way, I hope I never find myself in a situation where I meet my own third man. But if I do, I'm probably going to listen to them. So now I want to know what you think. If you've ever experienced anything like this, especially during an accident, an illness, or a dangerous situation, I'd really love to hear about it. Maybe you saw someone, heard a voice, or just felt certain that you weren't alone, and only realized afterwards that nobody could have actually been there. If so, send me that story, leave it in the comments, or reach out directly. Full episodes of The Real Unreal come out every other Monday with episodes of the in between in the weeks between. So follow the show wherever you're watching or listening if you want to know when the next one drops. Until then, stay curious.