The third man factor or third man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.
The third man factor or third man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.
Sir Ernest Shackleton, in his 1919 book South , described his belief that an incorporeal companion joined him and his men during the final leg of his 1914–1917 Antarctic expedition, which became stranded in pack ice for more than two years and endured immense hardships in the attempt to reach safety. Shackleton wrote, "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." [1] His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences.
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
— But who is that on the other side of you?
Lines 359 through 365 of T. S. Eliot's 1922 modernist poem The Waste Land were inspired by Shackleton's experience, as stated by the author in the notes included with the work. It is the reference to "the third" in this poem that has given this phenomenon its name (when it could occur to even a single person in danger).
In recent years, well-known adventurers like climber Reinhold Messner and polar explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft have reported experiencing the phenomenon. One study of cases involving adventurers reported that the largest group involved climbers, with solo sailors and shipwreck survivors being the second most common group, followed by polar explorers. [2] A similar experience was documented by mountain climber Joe Simpson in his 1988 book Touching the Void , which recounts his near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes. Simpson describes "a voice" which encouraged him and directed him as he crawled back to base camp after suffering a horrible leg injury high on Siula Grande and falling off a cliff and into a crevasse. Some journalists have related this to the concept of a guardian angel or imaginary friend. Scientific explanations consider the phenomenon a coping mechanism or an example of bicameral mentality. [3] The concept was popularized by a 2009 book by John G. Geiger, The Third Man Factor, which documents scores of examples.
Modern psychologists have used the "third man factor" to treat victims of trauma. The "cultivated inner character" lends support and comfort. [4]
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In Geraldine McCaughrean's 2005 young adult fiction novel The White Darkness , the teenage heroine, Sym, joins a doomed Antarctic expedition. Abandoned and lost, she is guided to safety by a "third man", her imaginary friend, Captain Lawrence Oates.
In Larry McMurtry's 1985 Western novel Lonesome Dove , Pea Eye, after surviving an Indian attack with Gus, makes a trek back to Call and has an experience of a "ghost" or "spirit" that guides him during his walk.
Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day makes reference to the experience.
In Max Brooks's 2006 novel World War Z , Colonel Christina Eliopolis crash lands in the midst of zombie-infested territory but is able to survive and be picked up with the assistance of a Sky Watcher codenamed "Mets Fan", who is later revealed to be a figment of her imagination. She maintains the belief that Mets is a real person.
In the 2018 film Adrift , Shailene Woodley's character Tami, a sailor whose companion is overboard after a hurricane in the middle of the Pacific, finds him in the sea injured and rescues him onboard. He accompanies her drifting through the ocean, helping her get through some hurdles, until he disappears one morning where she realizes she was hallucinating all along and he was lost at sea in the hurricane.
In the 2006 film The Guardian , a drowning sailor, being rescued by Ashton Kutcher's character Jake, asks, "Where is he?" and then tells of a man who had stayed with him and held him up until help arrived.
In the 2013 film Gravity , biomedical engineer Ryan Stone watches astronaut Matt Kowalski float away into space to certain death. Later in the film, as an exhausted Stone is about to give up, we see Kowalski appear and enter her space capsule, supposedly having survived. He gives Stone the strength of will to continue, and shows her a means to return to Earth, before being revealed as a figment of her imagination.
In the 1984 film Cloak & Dagger, Davey Osborne, a child who uses his imagination to replace his absentee father, is pursued by criminals attempting to retrieve hidden data from one of Davey's video game cartridges. In moments of danger and high stress, a Special Forces agent named Jack Flack seemingly magically appears to guide Davey through the situations. Notably, the characters of Jack Flack and Davey's father are both portrayed by the same person, actor Dabney Coleman.
In the 2023 book Into the Uncanny, author Danny Robins puts forward the idea that the Third Man Factor could potentially account for some reported ghost sightings, especially those in which the witness is being put under intense stress or mental strain.
In Season 25, episode 8 of Law and Order: SVU , the episode is titled "Third Man Syndrome" and the phenomenon is addressed, explained and brought to the attention of Captain Benson by a detective in her squad when she mentions the victim seeing someone who wasn't there.
Mount Everest, known locally as Sagarmatha or Qomolangma, is Earth's highest mountain above sea level, located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas. The China–Nepal border runs across its summit point. Its elevation of 8,848.86 m was most recently established in 2020 by the Chinese and Nepali authorities.
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
The Seven Summits are the highest mountains on each of the seven traditional continents. On 30 April 1985, Richard Bass became the first climber to reach the summit of all seven.
Lhotse is the fourth-highest mountain on Earth, after Mount Everest, K2, and Kangchenjunga. At an elevation of 8,516 metres (27,940 ft) above sea level, the main summit is on the border between Tibet Autonomous Region of China and the Khumbu region of Nepal.
Reinhold Andreas Messner is an Italian climber, explorer, and author from the German-speaking province of South Tyrol. He made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest and, along with Peter Habeler, the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. He was the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, doing so without supplementary oxygen. Messner was the first to cross Antarctica and Greenland with neither snowmobiles nor dog sleds and also crossed the Gobi Desert alone. He is widely considered to be the greatest mountaineer of all time.
Cho Oyu is the sixth-highest mountain in the world at 8,188 metres (26,864 ft) above sea level. Cho Oyu means "Turquoise Goddess" in Tibetan. The mountain is the westernmost major peak of the Khumbu sub-section of the Mahalangur Himalaya 20 km west of Mount Everest. The mountain stands on the China–Nepal border, between the Tibet Autonomous Region and Koshi Province.
Nanga Parbat, known locally as Diamer, is the ninth-highest mountain on Earth and its summit is at 8,126 m (26,660 ft) above sea level. Lying immediately southeast of the northernmost bend of the Indus River in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Nanga Parbat is the westernmost major peak of the Himalayas, and thus in the traditional view of the Himalayas as bounded by the Indus and Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra rivers, it is the western anchor of the entire mountain range.
The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. It was first published as a weekly serialisation from January 1886.
Figment is the mascot of the Imagination! pavilion at the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World Resort. He is a small purple dragon with a runaway imagination, which serves as a plot device in Journey into Imagination with Figment, the most recent edition of the pavilion, and he is featured in Epcot merchandise.
Józef Jerzy Kukuczka was a Polish mountaineer who is widely regarded one of the greatest high-altitude climbers in history. In 1987, he became the second man to climb all fourteen eight-thousanders in the world; a feat which took him less than 8 years to accomplish. He climbed all, except Lhotse, by new routes or in winter. He is the only person to have climbed two eight-thousanders in one winter and his ascents of Cho Oyu, Kangchenjunga and Annapurna were first winter ascents. His ascent of K2 was made in alpine style with Tadeusz Piotrowski, that route has not had a second ascent in over 35 years.
Journey into Imagination with Figment is the third and latest incarnation of a dark ride attraction located within the Imagination! pavilion at World Celebration at Epcot, a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida. Originally opened on March 3, 1983, its original and current version feature the small purple dragon named Figment as well as the song "One Little Spark", composed by the Sherman Brothers.
John Robert Francis Wild was an English sailor and explorer. He participated in five expeditions to Antarctica during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal with four bars, one of only two men to be so honoured, the other being Ernest Joyce.
Elizabeth Hawley was an American journalist, author, and chronicler of Himalayan mountaineering expeditions. Hawley's The Himalayan Database became the unofficial record for climbs in the Nepalese Himalaya. She was also the honorary consul in Nepal for New Zealand.
Stephanie Jutta Schwabe is a geomicrobiologist. She completed a Ph.D. in the biogeochemical investigation of caves within the Bahamian carbonate platforms, commonly referred to as blue holes. She is an expert geologic diver mostly in Bahamian blues holes, though her experience extends to expeditions in U.S. waters. Diver International named her one of the top 40 divers in the world.
Russell Reginald Brice is a New Zealand mountaineer. He was the owner/manager of Himex, a climbing expedition company. He has summited Cho Oyu seven times, Himal Chuli and Mount Everest twice, as well as Manaslu in October 2010, which was his 14th summit of an 8000 m peak.
Fredrik Sträng is a Swedish mountaineer, adventurer and documentary film maker.
John Grigsby Geiger is an American-born Canadian author and shipwreck hunter. He is best known for his book The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible, which popularized the concept of the "third man", an incorporeal being that aids people under extreme duress. The book is the basis for a National Geographic Channel video entitled Explorer: The Angel Effect, in which Geiger appears. In turn, a second book on the topic, based on, and taking its name from the National Geographic video, was published in 2013. His other works include the international bestseller Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition.
Stipe Božić is a Croatian mountaineer, documentary filmmaker, photographer and writer. He is the most successful Croatian Himalayan climber. Božić completed the Seven Summits and is the second European, after Reinhold Messner, to climb the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest, twice. He has directed more than 60 documentary films, mostly related to mountains and climbing.
Günther Messner was an Italian mountaineer from South Tyrol and the younger brother of Reinhold Messner. Günther climbed some of the most difficult routes in the Alps during the 1960s, and joined the Nanga Parbat-Expedition in 1970 just before the beginning of the expedition due to an opening within the team.
Karl Maria Herrligkoffer was a German medical doctor, who from 1953 and 1986, organized and directed numerous German and Austrian mountaineering expeditions including 13 expeditions to five of the world's highest peaks in the Himalayas and the Karakoram. There were some notable successes on these expeditions including the first ascent of Nanga Parbat (8126m), and also the second and third ascent of that mountain, the successful ascent of Everest (8849m) by 15 people from one expedition, the first ascent of the South Ridge of K2 (8611m), the first attempt on Broad Peak (8051m), and the first ascent of about 35 peaks during two expeditions to east Greenland.
