Liz Porter; 4/7/09
When John Geiger read Sir Ernest Shackleton’s memoir of his 1914-1917 Antarctic expedition, he was transfixed by the legendary polar explorer’s tale of his battle for survival after the team’s ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice. In the final weeks of the expedition, Shackleton and two companions had made a heroic, last-ditch attempt to reach a British whaling station, so they could get help to the other members of the expedition who were sick, exhausted and waiting 1100 kilometres away at Elephant Island. Filthy, ragged, dehydrated and ill-equipped, the trio trekked 38 kilometres across glaciers and icy mountain ranges on the island of South Georgia, reaching the British settlement 36 hours later. The Toronto-based writer was in awe of Shackleton’s powers of physical endurance. But it was the metaphysical aspect of the story that stayed with him — the “unseen presence” that, according to the explorer, had accompanied the three men on the last harrowing stage of their journey. “It seemed to me often that we were four not three,” Shackleton wrote in his memoir, South. Later, in his public lectures about the expedition, he referred to this presence as his “divine companion”.
See: http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-feature/mystery-of-the-third-man-20090627-d0j2.html?skin=text-only; The Third Man: Text Publishing; www.thirdman factor.com
The Miracle Man
John Geiger; Excerpt – SMH; 4/7/09; No internet text; This is an edited extract from The Third Man Factor (Text Publishing, $34.95); www.thirdmanfactor.com.
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 Centre in New York when the plane struck the north tower opposite him. It was 8.46am on September 11, 2001. There was a loud boom and the lights in the south tower flickered. Grey smoke poured from the north tower.
Most of those who worked at Euro Brokers started to evacuate the building, but DiFrancesco stayed. The money-market broker telephoned his wife, Mary, to tell her that a plane had hit the other tower but that he was fine and intended to stay at work. Then a friend from Toronto called. “Get the hell out,” he said. He began walking towards a bank of elevators.
At 9.03am, 17 minutes after the first impact, the second plane hit. United Airlines Flight 175, travelling at 950kmh, sliced into the south tower, igniting an intense fire fed by 90,000 litres of jet fuel. The Boeing 767 had been commandeered by al Qaeda terrorists after taking off from Boston en route to Los Angeles. It struck the building’s south face between floors 77 and 85.
DiFrancesco was hurled against the wall and showered with ceiling panels and other debris. The building swayed. The trading floor he had just left no longer existed. DiFrancesco entered stairway.
Fortuitously, he had stumbled on the only one that offered hope of escape for people above the zone of impact. DiFrancesco was joined by others in the stairwell and all began to descend.
Three flights down, they encountered a 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.”
Gasping for air, DiFrancesco decided to ascend, hoping to escape the smoke. He climbed several flights but at each landing, when he tested the fire doors, he discovered they were locked.
He guessed he reached the 91st floor of the 110-storey building before deciding 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 much more than a metre ahead.
He stopped at a landing in the middle of the impact zone, on the 79th or 80th floor. Overcome by the smoke, he joined others – about a dozen people in all, some stretched out, face-down on the concrete floor, others crouched in the corners, all gasping. Then, something remarkable happened: “Someone told me to get up.”
Someone, he said, “called me”. The voice – which was male but did not belong to one of the people 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; there was also a vivid sense of a physical presence.
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 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. “An angel” urged him along. “There was still danger, so it led me to the stairwell, led me to break through, led me to run through the fire.”
He covered his head with his forearms and continued down, now running. He was singed by the fire. He believed the flames continued for three storeys. 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. Said DiFrancesco: “I think at that point it let me go.”
He continued down as fast as he could, finally reaching the plaza level.
He was still in extreme danger. Fifty-six minutes had passed since the plane hit. The floors of the crippled building began to “pancake down” in a floor-by-floor collapse.
As he approached an 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 in hospital.
DiFrancesco was the last person out of the south tower of the World Trade Centre before it came down at 9.59am. The south tower collapsed in 10 seconds, causing a ferocious windstorm and massive debris cloud.
According to the official 9/11 Commission report, DiFrancesco was one of only four people to escape the building from above the 81st floor, the centre of impact for United Airlines Flight 175.
To this day, DiFrancesco cannot understand why he survived when so many others did not. But he has no doubt about the reason for his escape. A man of deep religious conviction, he attributes it to divine intervention.
- The early morning was perfectly still and silent. James Sevigny, a 28-year-old university student and his friend, Richard Whitmire, set out to climb Deltaform, a mountain in the Canadian Rockies. They ascended a couloir, an ice gully, in bright late-winter light on April 1, 1983, roped together. Whitmire, 33, was in the lead and at one point cut some ice loose. He yelled a warning – “Falling ice!” – to Sevigny below.
The ice catapulted safely past Sevigny but was suddenly followed by the collapse of a snowfield above the couloir on the north face. A tremendous roar broke the silence and the bright light was consumed by instant darkness. An avalanche swept the two men more than 600 metres to the base of Deltaform.
Sevigny regained consciousness, he guessed, an hour later.
He was severely injured. His back was broken in two places. One arm was fractured, the other had severed nerves from a broken scapula and was hanging limply at his side. He had cracked ribs, torn ligaments on both knees, internal bleeding and his face was a mess.
Whitmire lay nearby, and from his misshapen body it was clear he was dead. Sevigny lay down beside him, certain he would soon follow. “I figured that if I fell asleep, it would be the easiest way to go.” He lay there for about 20 minutes. Shivers were gradually replaced by the sensation of warmth brought about by shock and hypothermia and he began to doze off.
He realised there was no vast gulf separating life and death but rather a fine line, and at that moment Sevigny thought it would be easier to cross that line than to struggle on.
He then felt a sudden, strange sensation of an invisible being very close at hand. “It was something I couldn’t see but it was a physical presence.” The presence communicated mentally and its message was clear: “You can’t give up, you have to try.”
The presence urged Sevigny to get up. It dispensed practical advice. It told him, for example, to follow the blood dripping from the tip of his nose as if it were an arrow pointing the way.
The presence, which stood behind his right shoulder, implored him to continue
even when the struggle to survive seemed untenable. Because of its enormous empathy, he thought of the presence as a woman. She accompanied Sevigny across the Valley of the Ten Peaks to the camp he and Whitmire had started from earlier that day, a point where he hoped he could find food and warmth and perhaps help. Such were his injuries that it took all day to make the crossing of about 11/2 kilometres and his companion was with him every step of the way.
When he reached the camp, Sevigny could not crawl into his sleeping bag because his injuries were too severe and he could not eat because his teeth were broken and his face was swollen. He could not even light the stove. Then, at once, he thought he heard some other voices and called out for help. There was no response.
It was at that moment that he felt the presence leave. “It was gone, there was nothing there, there was no presence. There was no one telling me to do anything and I could tell that it had left.” For the first time since the avalanche, he was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness: “What I thought then was I’m hallucinating, the presence knows I’m dead and it has just given up on me. But as it turns out, those were people and they did come up. One of them skied out and they flew me out that night in a helicopter. In fact, the presence had left because it knew I was safe.”
-The opening to the underwater cave was barely wider than her shoulders. Bone- white stalactites and stalagmites reached out towards her as she swam deeper and further into the Mermaid’s Lair, on the south side of Grand Bahama Island, to her destination, nearly 300 metres away and 30 metres deep. For all its strangeness, it was a routine dive for the 40-year-old underwater explorer – except for the fact she was alone.
Usually, Stephanie Schwabe dived with her husband, the British cave explorer Rob Palmer. He was an expert on the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, a system of spectacular submarine caves. The Mermaid’s Lair, an extensive horizontal cave, had been explored previously by Palmer and Schwabe together – but not this day. Palmer was dead. He had failed to surface after a dive in the Red Sea earlier that year.
It was late August 1997 and Schwabe, a geomicrobiologist, was there to collect sediment samples for another scientist who was studying dust from the Sahara Desert that, centuries earlier, had been carried by winds across the Atlantic Ocean and deposited on the floor of the Mermaid’s Lair.
Once she reached the floor of the cave, she spent half an hour diligently gathering the red dust samples. When she was finished, Schwabe packed her equipment away and for the first time since she had reached the spot lifted her eyes. She suddenly realised that she could not see her guide-line. She searched for it, at first calmly, but then with increasing anxiety, but could not find it.
Schwabe experienced a growing sense of panic. She immediately realised her mistake. When she dived with Palmer, she often relied on him to serve as her guide. “I had based my dive on the unplanned assumption that he was there.” She checked her tank gauge and realised that she had only 20 minutes left. Schwabe’s panic turned to anger. She flew into a rage, furious at Palmer for his death, her sense of loss as palpable as the terror she felt. She was angry, too, at herself for “being so stupid”.
Then, at the height of the rage and sadness, Schwabe said: “I suddenly felt flushed and it seemed like my field of vision had become brighter.” She vividly felt the presence of another being with her. She believed it to be her dead husband.
She heard his voice, communicating mentally with her. “All right, Steffi, calm down. Remember, believe you can, believe you can’t, either way you are right. Remember?” It is something Palmer used to say to her all the time, acting as an invocation to her inner strength. Schwabe was stunned by the intervention but it was a help to her and she did calm down.
She methodically scanned the cave. She thought she saw the flash of a white line. Simultaneously, she felt as if the presence had gone. Schwabe immediately swam up to the line and followed it out. Eventually she saw the blue entrance, where light filtered into the cave. She thought to herself, “Today was not a good day to die.” She felt as if she had been saved by a presence she was sure was her dead husband.
- Ron Di FRancesco’s encounter in the south tower of the World Trade Centre, James Sevigny’s at the foot of Deltaform and Stephanie Schwabe’s in the Mermaid’s Lair of Grand Bahama Island may sound like a curiosity, an unusual delusion shared by a few overstressed minds. But the amazing thing is this: over the years, the experience has occurred again and again, not only to September 11 survivors, mountaineers and divers but also to 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 experienced the close presence of a companion and helper and even “of a sort of mighty person”.
To a man or woman, they report that at a critical point they were joined by an additional, unexplained friend who lent them the power to overcome the most dire circumstances.
There is a name for the phenomenon: the Third Man Factor.
While reading Sir Ernest Shackleton’s narrative South, I came across his strange report of an unseen presence that joined him during his escape from Antarctica after the expedition’s ship, Endurance, had been crushed by the ice. This is the most famous of all these encounters. It was Shackleton’s experience that gave the phenomenon its name. When I started looking, I soon found other similar reports.
It amazed me that these stories had never been collected in a single place. For five years I contacted survivors, read through old handwritten journals, combed through published exploration narratives and survival stories.
Drawn from all these examples are vital clues: the five basic rules that govern the Third Man’s appearance and invest the experience with meaning. These rules are
-the pathology of boredom,
-the principle of multiple triggers,
-the widow effect,
-the muse factor and t
-the power of the saviour.
Together, they help to explain the onset of the Third Man Factor. But they are causal in nature; they do not explain his origins or where the power comes from.
Over the years, various theories have been proposed to explain the Third Man. These attempts at understanding are themselves a record of man’s changing conception of himself. They begin with the guardian angel, followed by the sensed presence and the shadow person.
As clerics, then psychologists and, finally, neurologists theorised about the phenomenon, the trend has been a gradual reduction from the outside in, from God, to the mind, to the brain.
The Third Man represents a real and potent force for survival and the ability to access this power is a factor – perhaps the most important factor – in determining who will succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds and who will not.
Tags: Human Rights, Spirituality