IF YOU THINK REINHOLD Messner’s yeti sightings were nutty, wait till you hear the tales Maria Coffey turns up in her new book, (Tarcher/Penguin, $27). The veteran adventurer and author of 2003’s Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow had a couple of extrasensory experiences after her boyfriend died on Everest and she nearly drowned in Morocco, which got her wondering: Why do certain athletes—climbers, snowboarders, singlehanded sailors, and other hard-driving types—seem to have more spiritual and supernatural epiphanies than your regular Joe 10K? Thin air, mental exhaustion, and dehydration might be part of it. But Coffey posits a more curious theory: that athletes’ ability to push “beyond human consciousness into another realm” helps them break physical boundaries, and vice versa. Here are a few of the mind-boggling tales in her case files:
You're So Undead
“I know enough about high-altitude physiology to appreciate that the cold should have killed me, cerebral edema should have killed me, hypoxia should have killed me… [But] if I was dead on the evening of May 25 but alive on the morning of May 26, what happened?” —Aussie climber Lincoln Hall, on a night alone at 28,000 feet, in Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest (Tarcher/Penguin, )Explorers of the Infinite
Explorers of the Infinite
