In 2009 we saw the
appearance of John Geiger's interesting book The Third Man Factor.
Geiger compiled quite a few cases of people in great danger who felt
an extraordinary feeling that an unseen person was present, a person
urging them to make the extraordinary effort needed to survive.
The most common
type of person experiencing such a feeling seemed to be an adventurer
or explorer in great danger of dying. One such person was
James Sevigny, who reported that when he was in deep trouble when
exploring the Canadian Rockies, an unseen presence began mentally
communicating all kinds of instructions, apparently through something
like telepathy. When Stephanie Schwabe got into trouble during an
underwater cave dive, and was panicking, she felt an unseen presence
telling her to calm down. During a dire part of Ernest Shackleton's
epic struggle for survival in the Antarctic (one of the most
interesting adventure stories in history), Shackleton and two other
men (Crean and Worsley) sensed (according to their later reports)
that they had a feeling that there was an unseen person marching with
them. In 1933 when British explorer Frank Smythe almost became the
first man to climb the top of Mount Everest, he reported an extremely
strong sense of a helpful unseen companion as he trudged through
perilous terrain.
Geiger also
reported that this “third man factor” can occur in cases not
involving adventurers. One such case was Ron DiFrancesco, who tried
to descend a stairwell in the doomed World Trade Center on September
11, 2001, only to find his path blocked by smoke, fire, and wreckage.
DiFrancesco reported that an unseen presence suddenly addressed him
by name and gave him encouragement to make the enormous effort to
survive the crisis. He even reported that some unseen person “lifted
me up” and guided him down the damaged stairs, to safety. Finally,
improbably, he made his way to safety, becoming the last office
worker to make it out of the South Tower before it collapsed.
Some scientists have
created an experiment designed to explain away this “feeling of an
unseen presence.” But due to the poor design of the experiment, it
fails to do any such thing.
The research was
done by Olaf Blanke and his team in Switzerland. The first part of
their research involved studying people with epilepsy and other
motor-related problems, people who had reported feelings of an unseen
presence. Blanke claims to have found common brain lesions in such
people. But such research does nothing to explain the type of
incidents described in The Third Man Factor, which mainly
involve ordinary, healthy people without brain lesions, and largely
involve people with superb motor-related skills – quite the
opposite of people with motor-related problems.
The second part of
the research done by Blanke was a weird experiment using robots.
Seventeen subjects were blindfolded and linked up in some strange way
with robots, in some “master slave” arrangement. In some cases
the robots provided tactile feedback. Blanke reports that under such
conditions quite a few of the subjects reported a “feeling of
presence” rather like someone standing behind them – a hardly
surprising result for a blindfolded person who is hooked up with a
nearby robot as shown in the photo below.
The weird experiment (Credit: Alain Herzog/EPFL)
A press release
reporting on this research (reproduced here) has tried to suggest
that this research is some kind of explanation for the “third man
factor” described by Geiger. Such a suggestion is unfounded.
Blanke's research does nothing at all to explain the feeling of
telepathic communication reported in the accounts collected by
Geiger. Moreover, Blanke's research does not even explain the basic
sense of an unseen presence reported in such accounts. Why? Simply
because such accounts were given by people who were nowhere near
robots, but Blanke's experiments only involve people who are hooked
right up to robots.
What Blanke's
experiments show is merely that when you blindfold people and hook
them up to robots, they may have a feeling that somebody is nearby.
That's a very trivial finding, which doesn't really explain
anything.
I can only imagine
the deliberations that might have gone on when they were thinking up
Blanke's experiments. Perhaps it went something like this:
Scientist 1:
Let's try to debunk that “third man factor” reported in Geiger's
book. We'll trail a mile behind some mountain climbers climbing way
up some peak of 20,000 feet. We'll carry along some big heavy MRI
scanner, a generator, and some gas for the generator. Then if the
mountain climbers get into trouble and report that “third man
factor” thing--a mysterious sense of an unseen presence--we'll rush
over to them, scan their brains with the MRI, and show that it's just
due to some brain state.
Scientist 2:
No, no. Too much work. Let's just stay warm and comfy, stay indoors,
and play around with some robots.
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