Another.

Ernest Shackleton’s epic tale of survival after the sinking of his ship the Endurance in Antarctic waters is well known, but less known is what he and two of his companions experienced after they made their way by open boat, above, to South Georgia Island and trekked across to a whaling station to find salvation. Each of the three felt the presence of someone with them: “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” wrote Shackleton in his memoir, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

The phenomenon has since been widely reported, including by Reinhold Messner and polar explorer Peter Hillary, and it’s been given the name “the third man factor,” after the T.S. Eliot line, “Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you.”

True adventure begins at the edge of the known world, be it a physical place, physiological limit, or intellectual search beyond what we knew before, and all of those elements came together last November, when scientists in Switzerland made a groundbreaking discovery potentially explaining the third man phenomenon.  For the first time, Olaf Blanke and his colleagues replicated this experience in the laboratory using subjects that were otherwise perfectly healthy.

The test was so eerie some refused to continue.

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