What turns certain death into a narrow escape? For countless explorers, extreme athletes, and even victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a spectral presence, seen or sensed, has stepped in to save them: the Third Man.

By John Geiger

Ron DiFrancesco was at his desk at Euro Brokers, a financial trading firm on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, when the plane struck the North Tower opposite him. It was 8:46 am on September 11, 2001. There was a loud boom, and the lights in the South Tower flickered. Gray smoke poured from the North Tower. At impact, all the stairwells in the North Tower became impassable from the 92nd floor up, trapping 1,356 people. Some waved desperately for help. Most of those who worked at Euro Brokers started to evacuate the building, but DiFrancesco stayed. A few minutes later, a terse announcement was broadcast over the South Tower’s public-address system: An incident had occurred in the other building, but “Building Two is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building Two. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may return to your office by using the reentry doors on the reentry floors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat, Building Two is secure.…”

DiFrancesco, a money-market broker originally from Hamilton, Ontario, telephoned his wife, Mary, to tell her that he was fine and intended to stay at work. “It was Tower One that was hit,” he assured her. “I’m in Tower Two.” He tried to focus on the screens of financial data on his desk. Then a friend from Toronto called. “Get the hell out,” he said. DiFrancesco agreed and, after calling a few people to tell them of his change of plans, began walking toward a bank of elevators.

A few minutes later, at 9:03 am, the second plane struck. United Airlines Flight 175, traveling at 590 miles an hour, sliced into the South Tower, igniting an intense fire fed by up to 11,000 gallons of jet fuel. As the world was about to learn, the Boeing 767, carrying 56 passengers, two pilots, and seven flight attendants, had been hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists after taking off from Boston’s Logan International Airport en route to Los Angeles. The plane banked just before it slammed into the building between floors 77 and 85. The higher wing cut into the Euro Brokers offices, while the fuselage hit the Fuji Bank offices on the 79th through 82nd floors.

DiFrancesco was hurled against the wall and showered with ceiling panels and other debris. Brackets, air ducts, and cables sprang from the ceiling. The building swayed. The trading floor he had just left no longer existed.

DiFrancesco entered Stairway A. The South Tower had three emergency stairwells. Fortuitously, he had stumbled upon the only one that offered hope of escape for people above the zone of impact. An enormous elevator machine room on the 81st floor, where the nose of the 767 hit, acted as a firewall; in fact, the elevator equipment took up more than half the floor space and had forced the tower’s architects to route Stairway A from the center of the building toward the northwest corner — the farthest point from the impact zone. Others joined DiFrancesco in the stairwell, and all began to descend. The stairwell was smoky, lit only by a flashlight carried by Brian Clark, an executive vice-president at Euro Brokers and a volunteer fire marshal on the 84th floor. Three flights down, they encountered a heavy woman and a male colleague who were coming up. “You’ve got to go up. You can’t go down,” the woman insisted. “There’s too much smoke and flames below.”

They briefly debated whether to ascend and wait for either firefighters or a rooftop rescue by helicopter, or continue their descent despite the smoke. Clark shone his flashlight into his colleagues’ faces, asking each, “Up or down?” Then they heard someone call for help. Clark grabbed DiFrancesco by the sleeve. “Come on, Ron. Let’s get this fellow.”

The two left the stairwell and fought through debris on the 81st floor to locate the person. But DiFrancesco was soon overcome by smoke. He had a backpack, and held it over his face in an attempt to filter the air. But it wasn’t helping, and he was forced to retreat. Gasping for air, he decided to go up, hoping to escape the smoke. He climbed several flights, but at each landing, when he tested the fire doors, he discovered they were locked. A mechanism designed to prevent smoke from flooding the building had malfunctioned after the impact, preventing any of the doors, even on designated reentry floors, from being opened. He continued to climb and eventually caught up with some colleagues from Euro Brokers, several of whom were helping the large woman. She had convinced all of them that the best escape route was up the stairs. But as DiFrancesco continued up, the stairwell became more crowded. All the fire doors were locked. He guessed he had reached the 91st floor of the 110-story building.

Ron DiFrancesco is normally unflappable. He is a broker in a high-stakes business that demands steel nerves. But he is also slightly claustrophobic, and with the intensifying smoke, he began to panic. He thought of his family, that he had to see his wife and children again at all costs. He determined that he was “gonna make it out.” DiFrancesco decided to turn around and start back down. This time, the situation was much worse. Thick smoke poured up the narrow stairwell.

He groped his way down, unable to see more than a few feet ahead. 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.

A lot of people made split-second decisions that day that determined whether they lived or died. What is different about Ron DiFrancesco is that, at that critical moment, he received help from a seemingly external source. He had the sensation that “somebody lifted me up.” He felt that he was being guided: “I was led to the stairs. I don’t think something grabbed my hand, but I was definitely led.” He resumed his descent down the stairwell and soon saw a point of light. He followed it, fighting his way through drywall and other debris that had collapsed, obstructing the stairwell. Then he encountered flames. He recoiled from the fire. But still someone helped him. “There was still danger, so it led me to break through, led me to run through the fire.… There was obviously somebody encouraging me. That’s not where you go, you don’t go toward the fire.…” He covered his head with his forearms and continued down, now running. He was singed by the fire. He believes the flames continued for three stories. Finally, he reached a clear, lit stairwell below the fire, on the 76th floor. Only then did the sense of a benevolent helper, one who had been with him for five minutes, end. Says DiFrancesco: “I think at that point it let me go.”

Once he reached the ground floor, he headed for an exit, but a security guard stopped him, saying it was too dangerous. He looked out in horror at the falling debris and victims’ bodies. The guard directed him to another exit. DiFrancesco walked back through the concourse toward the northeast exit, near Church Street. Fifty-six minutes had passed since the second plane hit. The impact had severed many of the South Tower’s vertical support columns, and the heat from the explosion and fire had weakened the steel trusses. The floors of the crippled building began to pancake down in a floor-by-floor collapse. As he approached the Church Street exit, DiFrancesco heard an “ungodly roar.” He saw a fireball as the building compressed. He doesn’t know what happened next and was unconscious for some time, waking up much later at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.

As far as anyone can tell, DiFrancesco was the last person out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center before it came down at 9:59 am. According to the official 9/11 Commission report, DiFrancesco was one of only four people to escape the building from above the 81st floor. Moments before the tower collapsed, New York Police Department officers within the building informed dispatch that they had encountered a stream of people descending a stairwell at the 20s level. None of those people survived, but it is believed they were descending from above the impact zone, in which case they had followed DiFrancesco’s lead but had not been fast enough. To this day, DiFrancesco cannot understand why he survived when so many others did not. But he has no doubt how. A man of deep religious conviction, he attributes it to a divine intervention, “an angel” who guided and urged him through the impact zone to safety.

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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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Although stories of the third man had not been collected and compared in a single volume, he is, nevertheless, no stranger to science. Neurologists and psychologists have for decades attempted to explain its origin: a hallucination caused by extreme physical exertion or monotony; a medical condition attributable to low blood glucose, high-altitude cerebral edema, or cold stress; a ghostly apparition or mediumistic experience; a manifestation of a guardian angel; or a psychological “compensatory figure” that draws on extraordinary internal resources. One explorer even confided to me privately that he had wondered at times whether there is “just one Third Man, a single entity,” who has through time intervened to help those most in need. As the climber Greg Child said, solving the mystery of the Third Man is like a “detective stalking the invisible man; there is no fingerprint, no solid evidence at all. The clues lie deep within us.” Increasingly, that is where the evidence leads: to a mechanism of the brain, activated in those who cross the line of physical or psychological tolerance.

The Third Man may behave like a guardian angel, but when asked whether it is in fact an angel, most who have experienced it say no. Fabled climber Reinhold Messner, who has had multiple near-death experiences and more than one encounter with the Third Man, is emphatic on the point: “No, no, no. I think it is quite natural, and I think all human beings would have the same feelings or similar feelings if they would expose themselves to such precarious situations. The body is inventing ways to let the person survive.” That hindsight is not to say this “invention” isn’t vivid enough to appear to be reality. In 1980, as he climbed Everest’s North Face, Messner remembers being so fatigued he couldn’t eat or drink, until he heard a voice say, “ ‘Get on with the cooking.’… I divide the piece of dried meat, which I take out of the rucksack, into two equal portions. Only when I turn do I realize that I am alone.”

Even in the midst of disasters, an overwhelming majority of people adapt and cope, help themselves and each other. In situations where panic might be expected, it is often not found. Peter Suedfeld, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia who co-authored a landmark study of the Third Man phenomenon, has characterized Homo sapiens as the “indomitable species.” Writes Suedfeld, “The fact is that most survivors have demonstrated surprising ability to endure, recover from, overcome, and even be strengthened by events that to outside observers seem overwhelmingly destructive.” While an inordinate amount of attention is paid to those whose problems overpower them, there is a tendency, Suedfeld writes, to “downplay or ignore the strengths of survivors.”

Great emphasis is usually placed on post-traumatic stress, loss, and grief — much less on the capacity for coping. The typical reaction to disaster is not defeatist, but a determined struggle to survive, even in the face of staggering adversity. In some ways, people become stronger. Suedfeld said, “In general, it is true — people who come back from space or from polar research stations have a better sense of values, a better sense of purpose, a better sense of what’s important, a better balance in their lives. Most survivors of even extreme trauma, such as the Holocaust and other genocides, construct new, contented, and well-adjusted lives, even if they continue to experience occasional symptoms of stress.” No more eloquent testament to this resilience can be found than the Third Man. When the usual methods — resourcefulness, courage, and endurance — are exhausted, a mysterious power can still be called upon.

But does the Third Man guarantee a person’s survival? No, it does not, as Maurice Wilson, an Englishman who attempted Everest in 1934, demonstrated. Wilson had no climbing experience, and his struggle was one of undeniable courage, but it had the pall of tragic inevitability about it. Wilson was rebuffed on his first attempt at Everest by severe weather. On May 12, 1934, accompanied by two Sherpa porters, he set out to try again. This time he reached the 1933 British expedition’s Camp Four and hunkered down for days through hellish winds, snow, and cold. When the weather improved, he announced his intention to continue, but his porters refused to go with him — certain death, they warned. On May 27, as he fumbled into his sleeping bag, partially snow-blind and suffering from exhaustion, Wilson was overwhelmed by the sensation that someone was at his side. “Strange,” he wrote in his diary, “but I feel that there is somebody with me in tent all the time.”

His last diary entry was May 31: “Off again. Gorgeous day.” From that point his diary fell silent, and the extremity of his suffering in his final hours can only be deduced. His body, and diary, were found in 1935, a year after his death, at 21,980 feet, by Eric Shipton and Charles Warren, members of another British Everest expedition. It is unknown if his invisible companion stayed with him during his final hours. Wilson’s sad story emphasizes something important: There is no saving the life of one who will not be saved. The Third Man requires a willing partner.

The key to overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to survive begins, then, with the simple belief that an individual will somehow triumph over his or her immediate appalling situation; that he or she is going to live. That is the premise with which most people begin their ordeal. It is when that faith is severely tested, and failure — even death — seems inevitable, that the Third Man appears.

So what changes? It appears our brains have a kind of placebo social sense, a humanity trigger. In a study published in 2006, researchers with the Presurgical Epilepsy Unit of the Department of Neurology at University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, were able to artificially induce an “illusory shadow person” in patients by using a mild electric current to stimulate their left temporoparietal junction — an area of the brain involved in our awareness of our physical self that helps us distinguish between ourselves and someone else. Researchers have found a change in parietal activity at the height of meditative experiences, at a point when subjects reported a “greater interconnectedness of things,” which supports the view of some that the temporoparietal junction is also a prime node for religious experience. Lesions in this area can produce a sense of an unseen presence; the hyperactivity of schizophrenics’ temporoparietal cortex can result in their believing their own body is someone else’s.

But what activates this phenomenon in people in extreme environments? A British study published in 2002 speculated on the origin of the Third Man in such cases: “The hallucinations might indicate the brain’s attempt to create the perception of a person during cases of increased arousal (fear, paranoia). The heightened state of awareness and physical privation might go some way to explaining this in…shipwreck survivors and mountaineers.” The brain may be attempting to create a complete human form from “incomplete sensory data.” It is, in other words, creating a companion.

Does this capacity exist in every one of us? This mechanism is not some fluke of human brain structure, and it seems an unlikely by-product of decaying brain function. Perhaps it is there to do precisely what it does for people in need. It is possibly even an evolutionary adaptation. It’s a stirring reminder of what social animals we are — that in our time of deepest solitude and need, our brain finds a way to conjure up a helpful companion, and that companionship is what ultimately makes the difference between life and death.

The Third Man, then, is an instrument of hope, a hope achieved by a recognition that is fundamental to human nature: the belief — the understanding — that we are not alone.

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Excerpted from the book The Third Man Factor by John Geiger.