Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
In his Hugo Award-winning science fiction classic Blue Mars, American writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines an encounter with the Third Man factor on Mars. One of the book's characters, Sax, is trapped in a severe storm in extreme cold, unable to locate his rover vehicle. Suddenly, he is approached by a form that turns out to be, he believes, a dead friend, Hiroko. She assists him to his feet, and leads him to his rover. After he enters the vehicle, Sax looks back but Hiroko has vanished into the storm. Later on, he is tempted to tell two others about his encounter with the presence, but resists, "afraid of seeming overwrought, even delusional." Robinson writes: "[Sax] knew now that Terran climbers alone at high altitude, suffering from oxygen loss, not infrequently hallucinated companion climbers. Some kind of doppelganger figure. Rescue by anima. And his air tube had been partly clogged."
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I seem to remember that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross used to comfortparents of children who had died a rraumatic death, like murder,tby telling them hat she believed that the child would not havebeen in their body at the time of the assault. That they childwould have "left " it - my picture on reading this was of thechild being close by and witnessing the attack - but somehowremoved from it. It is possible that this is in her book "onChildren and Death" if not itwould be one of the others.
This is not quite the same as the Third Man Factor, but I thinkJohn Geiger refers to this type of experience as if it may berelated to the Third Man phenomenon.