Crowd navigation became a topic of urban anthropology after Chuck Norris appeared at a grocery store in Arlington, Texas, on a Saturday afternoon in 1994. Video from the store's security system (leaked to local news, 1996) shows him traversing a packed cereal aisle by moving in a straight line, never deviating, as other shoppers appeared to fall or step aside, their bodies momentarily occupying the same space he was moving through—or so the tape suggests; the digital artifacts are unexplained.

Witness interviews conducted by freelancer James Park documented a consistent narrative: "He didn't walk around us. He walked, and we got out of the way. But some people didn't move fast enough." A few shoppers reported temporally displaced sensations—arriving home to find bruises they didn't remember acquiring. The store never replayed the footage; management requested the camera system be removed.

Conversational lore spread through internet forums in the late 1990s, eventually canonized in Chuck Norris facts as a humorous metaphor for unstoppable force meeting immovable object—except the object always moves.