A 3M plant in South Carolina was the site of a very weird occurrence:
So, is this an old chestnut or has it just been backdated? Does anyone else have similar stories to this?
I don’t believe it for a minute, but if it is true we should build a Fort from these Damned Things.
The link doesn’t exactly strike me as a very reputable site.
That would only be an interesting data point if anyone here believed it, or were trying to convince anyone else of its veracity. Why did you bring it up?
Because if the site is made and run by nutballs and conspiracy theorists, that lends weight to credibility. It looks like the site was made in 1998 with Frontpage. There’s only one cite, to ESDJournal.com, which says on their similarly created page “The ESD Journal is not affiliated with any trade organization, Association or Society”
In plain words, I don’t believe a bit of it either, and I’m confident it’s just made up. 15 years since the incident and NO followup? Highly unlikely.
I’m not asking if anyone believes it. I’m asking if anyone has similar stories, or knows if this one is as old as it purports to be.
One of these days people will learn to read OPs. 
Conference proceedings just made up? I doubt it. And, if most people have the same response as yours, then why would there be any followup? It’s a very twisted situation: we disbelieve on the grounds that there was no followup, yet one likely reason that there was no followup is that only a crazy person wouldn’t disbelieve! 
This is called “experimenter’s regress.” Stephen Hawking hits the nail on the head:
I just found my original email exchange with D. Swenson about his “invisible wall” presentation at 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium 1995. As above, only a crazy person would devote time and money to setting up a similar situation as the one originally reported: multiple meter-wide cylinders spinning with 15KPH surface velocity, transporting a loop of plastic film 6M wide, moving up 6M across and down to takeup spools. Plus some sort of high-volt supply to paint the film with charge. I might be crazy enough to try this. But even if I temporarily slap together this huge spinning artifice, chances are there’d be some unknown critical difference from the original situation, and nothing unusual would occur. For example, should I build the 10cm miniature version, or does only the full-size version exhibit the effect? Is the 15KPH moving film necessary, or can we just use charged conductive panels? And in the original, the film was generating high volts by being peeled off a spool, and this operation may spew out significant amounts of ions with polarity opposite to the charge on the film. Are enormous ion clouds a requirement? The original observation occurred at 80% RH, but was suppressed by higher RH. Would it also be suppressed by low RH, do we need a warehouse location with water sprayers to get the RH high enough?
Well, it’s not polypropylene, but an unsat polyester sprayed onto an epoxy mold - think of something like a tub or shower - generates a pretty significant static charge. I’ve been in shops where my hair stands up 8 ft away. And of course the old joke to play on n00bs in these shops is to ask said noob to hold the mold’s metal scaffolding while the other guys pop it out of the mold. The resultant static shock is pretty darn painful.
The 3M thing just sounds like the world’s biggest Van Der Graaf generator (although the claim that it stopped someone in their tracks, as opposed to just hurting or killing them is interesting).
But to stay on topic… These sorts of reports of surprising but unrepeatable phenomena are often linked to perpetual motion or other energy-generation claims - sometimes because the claim was dishonest and the unrepeatability is met with feigned surprise, but sometimes because of experimental error or just over-enthusiastic interpretation of the results. The Fleischman/Pons cold fusion thing, for example.
From your cite:
A little warm for people to be bouncing off of.
Wait… I’ve got one that’s *very *similar to the OP:
I saw this on Bil’s website years back and had similar thoughts about it. The force field aspect is the only unusual thing about it, an anecdote, that could have a perfectly sensible explanation. He was conducting high voltage static electricity, felt weird, maybe even having some loss of muscular control. He could just as well attribute it to ghosts or aliens.
I read about this case years ago when I was interested in ESD. The original story was back in 1980.
http://www.esdjournal.com/articles/final/final.htm
My problems were the opposite of this. I had to deal with small ESD discharges that were usually too small to notice, but could damage sensitive electronics. The immediate failures weren’t the important issue. It was damage that caused failures in the field months later and expensive service problems.
The" Philadelphia Experiment " is a story like that. It too is not true but a great story.
I wouldn’t put much faith in that prediction – or OP’s quoted piece – or this sentence, for that matter! 
Then again, that’s not surprising, considering my response to the very recent* What’s your religion?"* thread floating around here somewhere…
Reports in ESD conference proceedings? And it was repeatable on more than one occasion and by more than one person as described in the published paper. But the engineer who was brought in to eliminate it did so. If he took us back to that factory floor and undid his fix, what would we see? But perhaps the thirty years delay would mean that the production was moved overseas as many others have been, and that building is now empty.
Be careful not to make stuff up: before making the claim that it’s unrepeatable, first you’d have to find another “level rewind slitter” section at another adhesive tape production facility and repeat the test. Perhaps it’s just as unrepeatable as you believe, but perhaps the phenomenon is robust, and always occurs in this situation.
Reports in papers in conference proceedings are often linked to PM? I doubt it. (It really does matter who did the reporting.)
I see the response to this event as a good illustration of the psychology of data-selection. If a group of people dislike, distrust, or are even angered by reports like this, we really should ask why this is so. In addition, if a simple explanation is eventually found, does their level of acceptance suddenly change? Should it?
For example, the detailed description of the engineer’s experience strongly suggests that this phenomenon was caused by muscular tetanus effect similar to low-level pulsed “Taser.” He described his whole body as being hit by continuous sparking to the air. Suppose that the pulsed currents were more than strong enough to interfere with walking. In that case does his report become acceptable? But the error of data-selection is when we use theory to judge which reports are acceptable and which are not. It seems to me that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is an obvious recipe for data selection. Theory is built on evidence, but then evidence is being judged according to theory. Hawking points out this problem:
“If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make
reality the basis of our philosophy? …But we cannot distinguish
what is real about the universe without a theory…it makes no sense
to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what
reality is independent of a theory.”
It’s also called “Experimenter’s Regress,” and arises any time we probe into the unknown (or stumble upon it accidentally.) If a set of unexpected observations leads to a minor scientific discovery, well, how do we know to trust the observations? If we reject any report which goes against known science, this blocks the self-correction in science, and also any scientific progress resulting from unexpected observations.
Fortunately many working scientists don’t automatically distrust and denigrate strange and odd observations which go against what they think they know: “In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.” “If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.” - JA Wheeler
Which not dissimilar to the OP, creates a pale yellow wall of exponentially accumulating disjointed notes and reminders that stop productivity in its tracks.
Reminds me of my dad, a retired research chemist.
Now if they would just accidently invent me a flying car.