Bill, A friend just sent me this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpBxCnHU8Ao Beautiful video. The bumps at the beginning (threshold field presumably) may be relevant to your airthreads phenomenon. Here the field is magnetic rather than electric and the fluid is magnetically polarized (ferromagnetic fluid, contains tiny magnetic dipoles) rather than electrically polarized (water molecules are tiny electric dipoles) but a similar goose bumping phenomenon could be expected in your experiment, although obviously on a smaller scale as otherwise the bumps would have been visible. Wrt the hollow you unambiguously observed by laser reflection, might it have been a "valley" between several bumps or the inside of a volcano-like structure?
Michel
