Yeah I am aware to take the account given with a pinch of salt.... But It is an interesting tale and if it were true which it seems people here are not in the camp of believing this mistake could have occurred of sending out an alternative cut by mistake or an undesired cut to be shown (which actually happened anyway) regarding the extra shots of the falcons dish under Luke before he drops and the Fleet shot at the end and various audio differences that were altered.
The thing I am most interested about in this account given are of the following.
The Bacta Tank claiming it to be "RED" and it being misinterpreted as Lukes Blood.
General Veers Death and the suicide of Hobby and that Veers is confirmed to not destroy the generators.
The Torture of Han Solo and that the effect was removed of hitting his "chest" now I have imagined some form of electric coming off that torture chair thing and I wonder what it looked like before it was toned down as it was deemed to be too graphic and some of the screaming was removed.
That is what all these scenes have in common also, they are deemed for one reason or another even if misinterpreted in the case of the BACTA tank to be quite graphic and mostly they all contain violence of one form or another.
The Shining was also released in 1980 and the true ending was removed after 2 weeks at Stanly Kubrick's request
And the story here about Aliens also checks out that some VHS copies contained the Turret scene while others did not. Not sure about in cinema theaters though.
So stuff like this did happen in those days, mistakes were fairly common or different cuts made their way out by mistake.
EDIT:
I found the script 5th draft here which does indeed seem to have been used for the most of the film and follows fairly closely with some alterations particularly towards the end of the film we start to find more differences
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Empire_Strikes_Back.pdf
And the script that was labelled 5R was constantly altered throughout filming