The Third Man Factor

Surviving the Impossible

John Geiger

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847677709
• Print ISBN:
  9781847674203

The Third Man Factor tells the revealing story behind an extraordinary idea: that people at the very edge of death, often adventurers or explorers, experience a benevolent presence beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive.
If only a handful of people had ever experienced the Third Man, it might be dismissed as an unusual delusion but amazingly, over the years, the experience has occurred again and again: to mountaineers, divers, polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, aviators, astronauts and 9/11 survivors. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having experienced the close presence of a helper or guardian. The mysterious force has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention while recent neurological research suggests something else.
In The Third Man Factor John Geiger combines history, scientific analysis and great adventure stories to explain this secret to survival, the Third Man who - in the words of legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner - 'leads you out of the impossible'.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Chapter One: The Third Man
• Chapter Two: Shackleton’s Angel
• Chapter Three: The Ghosts Walk In Public
• Chapter Four: The Guardian Angel
• Chapter Five: The Pathology Of Boredom
• Chapter Six: The Principle Of Multiple Triggers
• Chapter Seven: Sensed Presence (I)
• Chapter Eight: The Widow Effect
• Chapter Nine: Sensed Presence (Ii)
• Chapter Ten: The Muse Factor
• Chapter Eleven: The Power Of The Saviour
• Chapter Twelve: The Shadow Person
• Chapter Thirteen: The Angel Switch
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• Also By John Geiger
• Copyright Page