The Why Files: Operation Podcast
What Science Found at the Edge of Death | The Third Man
08 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What experiences do climbers report at the edge of death?
Frank Smythe had to stop. He was 28,000 feet up Everest and fading. He knew if he closed his eyes, he wouldn't open them again. Lots of climbers took their last breath right here. Some were still frozen in the ice. But his partner wasn't worried. They just needed a break and a bit of food. Frank broke a mint cake in half and held a piece out. but nobody was there. But Frank knew he wasn't alone.
He experienced something thousands of people in danger experience, an unseen presence, calm and familiar, always there when you're about to die. Scientists call him the third man. They even built a machine that can summon him. But what the machine creates and what survivors describe, they are two very different things.
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To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wegovy clinical study information, and restrictions, visit HIMS.com. Ernest Shackleton's ship got crushed by Antarctic pack ice in November 1915. 27 men, three lifeboats, no ship. They camped on the ice for five months, dragging the lifeboats behind them.
When the ice broke apart, they launched the boats and sailed 200 miles to the nearest land. But it was nothing more than a barren rock in the middle of nowhere. There was no hope of rescue. Nobody knew where they were. So Shackleton piled into a lifeboat with five men.
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Chapter 2: Who is the 'third man' and what role does he play in near-death experiences?
They endured hurricane winds, and 20 foot waves for 800 miles but finally they reached south georgia island that was the good news the bad news they landed on the wrong side the whaling station that could save them was on the north coast they were on the south and between them was a mountain range nobody crossed nobody even dared to try But Shackleton was out of options.
He picked two men for the final push, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley. They carried 50 feet of rope, a small axe, and three days of food. No tent, no sleeping bags, no good options. If they stay, they die. I saw McGyver get off an island once. All he had was a casso, a dental dam, and an extra rigid churro. A rigid churro. Well, it wouldn't work with a flaccid churro. Okay.
But it's nothing to be ashamed of. It happens to everybody's churro once in a while. For 36 straight hours, they climbed. They navigated by the stars when they were lucky enough to have clear sky. Mostly, they just climbed in the dark. At one point, they got pinned. Going back meant freezing to death. Waiting meant freezing to death.
So Shackleton coiled the rope beneath the three men like a sled, closed his eyes, and they pushed off. They slid 2,000 feet, screaming the whole way. Then they hit a snowbank, and somehow nobody died. They finally stumbled into the whaling station, filthy and frostbitten, but alive.
Three men just pulled off one of the greatest survival feats in history, and each of them was hiding a secret from the others. Only later did they learn they all had the same secret. Weeks later, Shackleton admitted it first. It seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing of it to Crean or Worsley. I could not bring myself to look behind me.
I feared what I might see, or worse, what I might not. Worsley said the same thing, a presence just outside his field of vision keeping pace. They never saw the figure, never heard it speak, but all three were sure someone walked with them across that mountain range. T.S. Eliot wrote about it in his famous poem, The Wasteland.
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. I do not know whether a man or a woman, but who is that on the other side of you?
That line gave the phenomenon its name, the third man. And 11 years later, Charles Lindbergh tried to cross the Atlantic alone, but he wasn't alone for long. On May 20th, 1927, Charles Lindbergh climbed into a single engine plane at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He was gonna fly nonstop to Paris, 33 hours over the open ocean alone. Plenty of pilots tried, none made it.
No, you're talking about Sister Betrell. What? You said a none made it. Sister Betrell is the only flying none I know. No, none as in no one. How dare you? Sally Field is not no one. I like her. I really like her. The problem started before he left the ground. By the time he hit the Atlantic, he was on his second straight day without sleep. 22 hours into the flight, he felt himself slipping.
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Chapter 3: How did Ernest Shackleton's journey illustrate the phenomenon of the third man?
Near the bottom of the mountain, an avalanche hit. Reinhold barely survived, and Gunther didn't. His remains weren't found for almost 50 years. In 1985, two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, were coming down the west face of Ciula Grande when Joe slipped and shattered his leg. This was a bad one. Bone was poking through the skin.
And they were 20,000 feet up, so there'd be no rescue. So they worked out a system. They had a 300-foot rope, one end tied around each man. Simon would lower Joe down slowly, let him get in place with his good leg, and then follow down. And they did this for hours. 3,000 agonizing feet. Then a storm hit, and they lost sight of each other. Simon called out, but the wind was too loud.
Suddenly, Simon felt the rope snap against his ribs as it went taut. A gust knocked Joe off the mountain, so his full weight was pulling on Simon. Simon dug in as best he could, but his hands were frostbitten, and he was down to one anchor. If Joe didn't grab hold soon, they'd both fall. Simon held that rope for a full hour while the storm got worse. Then he heard a dull scrape.
His last anchor was starting to give. He still couldn't see Joe. He screamed. He begged. Nothing. Another gust of wind roared through, and the anchor slipped again. If Simon waited any longer, they'd both die. He had only one terrible option. He cut the rope. Joe fell 100 feet into the dark. Simon assumed he was dead. He should have been, but he wasn't.
Joe landed on a snowbank inside the crevasse, alive, alone, in the dark, with a shattered leg. Above him, a 100-foot drop he couldn't climb. Below him, a bottomless pit. No food, no radio, no way out. Then he heard a voice. Not his own thoughts, another voice, clear and calm. It told him to stop looking for a way up. The way out was down. Joe couldn't see what was down there, but he went anyway.
And for three days, the voice kept talking. Which direction to crawl, when to rest, when to keep moving. There was this voice talking to me, and it was quite clear. You've got to do this. You've got to do that. And I do it. Joe dragged a shattered leg over boulder fields and three glaciers. He dragged himself all the way back to camp just as Simon was packing up.
Simon looked like he saw a ghost. Joe said he might have been saved by one. He wrote about it in Touching the Void. He didn't believe in ghosts or God or guardian angels or any of it. But he believed that voice was real, and he knew it saved his life. Two cases, two mountains. One presence watched a man die and couldn't stop it. Another pulled a man out of a hole in the ice.
Whatever the third man is, he doesn't work the same way twice. Because 12 years later, a cave diver lost her lifeline in 100 feet underwater. She had 20 minutes of air left, and the stranger who came for her wasn't invisible. She knew him. In 1997, Rob Palmer was one of the world's leading experts on blue hole diving. He spent years mapping underwater cave systems other divers wouldn't touch.
That summer, he went on a dive in the Red Sea, and he never came back. A few weeks after Rob died, his widow got back on the water. Stephanie Schwab was a geologist. She studied the underwater caves of the Bahamas, same territory her husband worked. She'd been in those caves dozens of times. She suited up alone and descended into a cave called Mermaid's Lair. Yeah, Mermaid's Lair.
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Chapter 4: What happened during Charles Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic?
The robot behind copies this in real time and taps the subject on the shoulder. Fine. But when the robot's reactions were delayed just by half a second, volunteers felt something. a presence behind them, not the robot, a presence, sentient and aware. Some got so disturbed, they asked to stop. Two subjects felt even more than one presence in the room, all from half a second delay.
Blanc's team built a machine that could create the third man on demand. The third man experiment proved that when the brain's prediction of sensation is interrupted, it attributes those sensations to an external agent, in other words, the third man. But there's a big problem with this theory. That's not how the third man works at all.
In 2014, researchers designed a robotic presence experiment to mimic the sensed presence in controlled conditions, and it worked. A presence appeared, but it was nothing like the third man. Subjects described a shadow entity that made them uncomfortable, even frightened. That's not how the third man works. He doesn't create fear, he takes it away.
Every survivor describes a calming presence, supportive and encouraging. The mechanism matched, the experience didn't. So is the third man real? Well, let's break it down. The skeptical explanation is clean. Under extreme stress, the brain misfires. It hallucinates a second person built from its own signals. Blanc proved it by stimulating the temporoparietal junction.
Complementary pirate luncheon. Temporopara... Never mind. Electrode on, ghost appears. Electrode off, gone. His team reproduced the effect in healthy people in minutes. The third man is the brain talking to itself and not recognizing its own voice. And that explanation fits every survivor. Shackleton had been awake 36 hours in sub-zero cold. Lindbergh hadn't slept in over two days.
Joe Simpson was hypothermic with a shattered leg. And Ron DeFrancisco was breathing smoke and carbon monoxide. But the glitch theory can't explain the most important part. The third man is helpful. Hallucinations from oxygen deprivation are chaotic. Melting walls, hostile figures, panic. The third man is the opposite. He's calm. He gives directions. He knows the way out. And he's consistent.
In 1943, the British neurologist MacDonald Critchley interviewed almost 300 shipwreck survivors. This was 60 years before Blanc picked up an electrode. Critchley found the same pattern. Calm presence, specific guidance disappears when the danger ends. Christians and atheists, 1916 and 2001. Mountain climbers and office workers. All of them describe the same thing.
There's one more theory worth mentioning. In 1976, psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that ancient humans didn't have the kind of internal experience that we have today. They heard voices, commands from the right hemisphere of the brain, and interpreted them as gods. Jaynes called it the bicameral mind. The theory says that under extreme stress, the brain reverts to that older operating system.
The command voice comes back. It sounds like science fiction, but it fits these theories better than a misfiring brain does. But here's the question nobody can answer. If the brain makes the third man, why does it make him a savior? Evolution doesn't usually build backup systems that switch on at the moment of death, unless they work. Systems that are calm, specific, directional.
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