Isegoria

Ron DiFrancesco was the last person to make it out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Not everyone trying to escape with him made it:

He stopped at a landing in the middle of the impact zone, on the 79th or 80th floor. Overwhelmed by the smoke, he joined others, about a dozen total, some stretched out facedown on the concrete floor, others crouched in the corners, all gasping for air.

A collapsed wall blocked further descent. DiFrancesco could see panic in people’s eyes. Some were crying. Several began to slip into unconsciousness. Then, something remarkable happened: “Someone told me to get up.” Someone, he says, “called me.” The voice, which was male but did not belong to anyone in the stairwell, was insistent: “Get up!” It addressed DiFrancesco by his first name and gave him encouragement: “It was, ‘Hey! You can do this.’ ” But it was more than a voice — DiFrancesco had a vivid sense of a physical presence nearby.

DiFrancesco experienced the Third Man Factor at work:

Ron DiFrancesco’s encounter may sound like a curiosity, an unusual delusion of an overstressed mind or a testament to his faith. But over the years, the experience he described has occurred again and again, not only to 9/11 survivors, but also to mountaineers, divers, polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having felt the close presence of a companion and helper — one that offered a sense of protection, relief, guidance, and hope, and left the person convinced that there was some other being at his or her side, when by any normal calculation there was none.

There is, it seems, a common experience that happens to people who confront life at its extremes, and strange as it may sound, given the cruel hardship they suffer to reach that place, it is something wonderful. This radical notion is based on the extraordinary testimony of scores of people who have emerged alive when they ought to have died. To a person, they report that at a critical point they were joined by an additional, unexplained friend who lent them the power to overcome the direst of circumstances. There is a name for the phenomenon: It’s called the Third Man factor.

The most famous of these encounters comes from Sir Ernest Shackleton, who in his narrative South gave the strange report of an unseen presence that accompanied him on his escape from Antarctica after the expedition’s ship, Endurance, had been crushed by ice. It was Shackleton’s experience that inspired the term “Third Man factor” (although for his group it was actually a “fourth man” — T.S. Eliot misremembered the number when he wrote his poem The Waste Land, which popularized the idea). The brilliant and fearless climber Wilfrid Noyce considered the Third Man a “second self.” Some say he’s a hallucination. Some say he’s real.

When I first began searching for answers, it amazed me that these stories had never been collected in a single place, so I began to assemble them. For five years I contacted survivors, read through old handwritten journals, and combed through published exploration narratives and survival stories. Sometimes all the conditions seemed right for such an experience, but there would be no mention of it in any published account. Then, when I would approach a survivor — such as the British climber Tony Streather, who narrowly escaped death on Haramosh in the Karakoram — I would discover that an unseen being had intervened to help him, too. It was only years after his ordeal that Streather, who was giving a lecture on teamwork and survival to a class at the British military academy at Sandhurst, told his students of the presence that sometimes seemed to actively help pull him up an avalanche field. As Streather later elaborated, “there was some being which helped me survive.”

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