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“How do you explain bliss? How do you explain that in words, other than holding my granddaughter, or being hugged by my husband? It’s just the best feeling.”

I cornered J.D.

“What were you thinking about when you were sending your thoughts?” I asked.

“Some of the stuff I’m not going to share with you.” He laughed, looking slyly at his wife across the room.“But others . . . well, she has a picture with her today that shows her with her granddaughter, and there’s just a bond between them. It makes her feel so good, so I was thinking of those things.”

Initially, I found it impressive that they had focused on the same two things—each other and Teena’s granddaughter. But I quickly checked myself. Of course their thoughts overlapped: you would hardly expect them to be pondering presidential politics during a “love” study. In my head I heard the sonorous voice of Richard Sloan, the skeptic at Columbia Medical Center, scolding me:“Anecdotes, while interesting, are merely anecdotes. They are not evidence.”

Equally intriguing was the story Teena told me while we waited for the results. I asked her if she thought that these connections that Radin and others had measured might simply be statistical flukes or chance happenings.

“It can’t be,” she insisted. “It’s energy. I have always believed that, because I’ve been linked to certain people.”

She paused. “For example, one day I knew something wasn’t right with my daughter. She was nineteen, and I picked up the phone and I called a number. I don’t know where the number came from. And this young voice on the other end of the phone picked it up, and I said, ‘Hello.’ And I immediately started talking. I said, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I believe my daughter is walking toward you at this very moment.’And he got very quiet.

“And he said, ‘Describe her.’

“And I said, ‘She’s about five-two, she’s very attractive, she’s nineteen, she’s got long dark hair . . .’

“ ‘What’s her name?’

“ ‘Alison,’ I said. Then I heard him calling, ‘Alison!’ ”

Teena laughed. “She was in the parking lot at a gas station, her car had broken down, and that was the closest place she could get to. And when Alison heard him calling her name, she stopped, because she didn’t know him, and he didn’t know her.

“And the young man said, ‘Your mother’s on the phone. She wants to talk to you.’ ”

Teena smiled. “And that’s what I mean when I say I’m linked with people.”

Later, I phoned Alison to ask for her version of events. She recalled that in the fall of 1994 or spring of 1995, when she was a freshman at the University of Nevada in Reno, she was driving home from school to her mother’s home near San Francisco. Her car began to break down near Sacramento. She managed to pull into a service station, and as she was talking to the mechanic, the phone rang. She heard him say,“Yeah, your daughter’s right here,” and he handed her the phone.

“Is your mother really intuitive?” I asked.

“Yes, but not like that. It was crazy.”

Alison does not remember calling her mother from the service station or a pay phone beforehand—but she may have. She does not believe she gave her mother the telephone number at the gas station—but it is a possibility. I have eliminated one other possibility: the technology that would have allowed Teena to return the call automatically, without knowing the number—*69 or caller ID—was not available in California in 1995. As with so many other stories I encountered in my research, this one is not airtight: a skeptic will dismiss it and a believer will feel a shiver of recognition.

I turned to Marilyn Schlitz at IONS, who had been listening to the story and nodding.

“How can this be explained?” I asked. “Is this common?”

“Well, to have such a clear example, where you have a number which is seven digits, is pretty improbable, to say the least. Certainly the experience is widely reported, and we do see a lot of evidence for this kind of thing within the laboratory as well.”

Of course, no matter how many strange stories you present,