Surviving the Impossible
A riveting combination of popular science and adventure, The Third Man Factor explores the human capacity to survive and transcend extreme conditions.
If only a handful of people had ever encountered the Third Man, it might be dismissed as an unusual delusion shared by a few overstressed minds. But over the years, the experience has occurred again and again, to 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, divers, polar explorers, prisoners of war, sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having sensed the close presence of a helper or guardian. The force has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention. Recent neurological research suggests something else.
Bestselling and award-winning author John Geiger has completed six years of physiological, psychological, and historical research on the Third Man. He blends his analysis with compelling human stories such as that of Ron DiFrancesco, the last survivor to escape the World Trade Center on 9/11; Ernest Shackleton, the legendary explorer whose account of the Third Man inspired T.S. Eliot to write of it in The Waste Land; Jerry Linenger, a NASA astronaut who experienced the Third Man while aboard the Mir space station – and many more.
Fascinating for any reader, The Third Man Factor at last explains this secret to survival, a Third Man who - in the words of famed climber Reinhold Messner - "leads you out of the impossible."
Offers a fascinating look at the phenomena through the eyes of those who have experienced it and invites speculation about our beliefs.”
Highly readable, often gripping.”
An intelligent rendering of a chilling phenomenon”
Gripping...Whether this ‘guardian angel’ factor is neurological or divine, Geiger’s fresh, insightful book will tell readers ‘things that are not easily explainable, but no less real for that.’”
Fascinating…Geiger’s book has a lot going for it: The many accounts of Third Man visitations in perilous situations make for edge-of-seat reading, and the citations and explorations of the theory of the sensed presence give the book scientific weight. It even contains a moral.”
Riveting…truly revelatory…an important book.”
This deeply humane book is far more than the sum of its parts: Geiger elegantly demonstrates how these divergent and very personal experiences reveal our profoundly social nature.”
