A story about a man carrying over 30,000 (sometimes reported as 40,000) volts of static electricity in his body, allegedly generated by a wool sweater and nylon jacket combination, is circulating through major news outlets.  The story, carried first by the Warrnambool Standard, says that the man, Frank Clewer, a 58-year old cleaner from Dennington, involuntarily created a scene by causing fire departments to evacuate three buildings where he had left his mark, before he realized he was causing the burn marks on carpets and allowed the fire department to help him.
The story has been picked up by The Register, Guardian, BBC, USA Today, Reuters, local agencies of ABC, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other news outlets.
Several unanswered objections mark the story as a possible hoax:
The equation for stored energy in capacitors is:
Where U = energy, C = capacitance, and V = voltage.  A human body by itself typically has a capacitance of around 250 pF, which would mean a voltage of 30,000 V would produce energy of 0.11 joules.  Even if Clewer's possessions resulted in a parallel capacitance of 1 microfarad, this would still only result in an energy storage of 450 J.  This amount of energy would be insufficient to burn carpet or char plastic, although a spark could ignite flammable vapor or gas.

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Australian man allegedly ignites carpet, plastic with static electricity