Okay, we'll move on to the next story. I'm excited about this story. It's got video with it. I don't know how familiar you are with the Max Headroom signal hijacking in nineteen eighty seven. I know a bit about it. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that tonight. A lot of people consider this to be really scary. To me, it's almost humorous, but I can see where it's pretty freaky too though. Oh yeah, and this is a well known thing. But there's got to be people watching this right now that have not heard of this, and I'm excited to share that with them. Sound good, Okay, So, yeah, this is the Max Headroom signal hijacking. On the night of November twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, the television signals of two stations in Chicago, Illinois were hijacked, briefly sending a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume to thousands of home viewers. So, just to go to a little bit of a backstory year on what or who rather Max Headroom is. He's a fictional character that they really got going in the eighties. I think it was actually played by an actor. But this is advertised as like the first computer generated TV host TV presenter. It was clearly just an actor. I think they got makeup on him and other prosthetic things and contact lenses, and I think the way they shot with the camera they tried to make it look like this was an AI generated person. The lighting looked weird, right, and he would have this weird the background to be moving, these like straight bars had been moving behind him, and he actually caught on. I think it started as like he had like a television series and stuff. He caught on to the point where I believe major companies were using him, like Coca Cola for other advertisements, things like that he was well known. Put it that away. This is not the first time this had happened with the broadcast television. There was a real notable event that happened the year before with HBO where somebody had hijacked the HBO signal and broadcast at a message essentially complained about the price jack and then I don't want to mess up the terminology, but HBO basically made it where you weren't going to see it for free anymore. They would mess with the image. I think they called it scrambled it. So this wasn't a new event, new thing that happened, but this is definitely, like probably the most notable one. Obviously there's stories that go back to like War of the World's Plan on radio and stuff like that, but this one is pretty creepy, so we'll get into it here. Okay. So yeah, like I said, this was the night of November twenty second, nineteen eighty seven. This takes place in Chicago, Illinois. The first hijacking of the radio of the airwave took place at nine to fourteen PM during a sports segment on WGN's TVs the nine o'clock news. Home viewer screens went black for about fifteen seconds before footage of a person wearing and Max's headroom mask and sunglasses is displayed. The individual rocks erratically in front of the rotating metal panel behind him. You could tell it's it's somebody in a Max Headroom costume, but they're trying to mimic this background that's moving around. Like we talked about, it was just a bunch of buzzing sounds on this first one is as if the audio did not go through, So it was strange. This lasted about twenty seconds and was cut off when the engineers that were on shift then changed the frequency of the signal linking the broadcast studio to the transmitter on top of the John Hancock Center. I do have a video to share of this first event when they were able to take over the this particular news channel. Slowt me pull it up here, dump of Pine McMahon McKennon fourteen Nothing bears. Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so on my actually the computer that we have running our news from time to time took off and went wild. So what we're gonna do is tart over from the top of the Bears and tell you once again about the thirty to ten victory they had over Detroit today out of Soldier Field. So yeah, this first instance goes by and the news crew on shift actually acknowledges it, right. They don't know what happened back then. Funky things that happened sometimes, like what you're trying to display would get scrambled or whatever it get stuck on the screen, So they're not really sure what happened. At this point in time. Like I said, there's no audio, it's just a brief interruption. I think that I say maybe fifteen seconds. I think the whole thing went on twenty seconds in total, So just weird. Nine to fourteen at night is a very is a primetime television time, right I mean. And they kind of blew it off and said it was the computer doing funky things, which I guess back then probably people didn't really know as much about computers either, right, so they're just like, hey, this is just this is computer acting funky. Right. Moving on later in the night. This is at about eleven twenty pm, and that is the same night. However, this is a different station. The first one was WGNTV that eleven twenty pm on WTTW. It's the essentially the local signal for the PBS station. It was interrupted during Doctor Who. It was a horror of fang Rock, which I'm not familiar with that, But the culprit of this hijacking of the airwave was the same. It was the Max Headroom impersonator, and this time audio actually came through. Let's just go ahead and share that clip before we discuss it. This is where things get freaky. You should do gotten with the old ones of your child. But it is the only way to learn. I'll get you a hot drink and dry checks worst cases as Oh, I guess they're giant master my greatest barl newspaper nerds. My mother were the other one. Suppose I can tell the massive Yeah, freaky, So let we'll go on with the description of the events. Here the mass figure made a comment about nerds, calling w G and sportscaster Chuck Sworsky a freaking liberal, held up can at Pepsi while saying catch the wave. That's a slogan from the campaign for Coca Cola. That what we were talking about the Max Headroom character was doing, and held up the middle finger inside what appears to be a hollowed out sex toy. The figure then ran through a series of quick comments and in song snippets with exciting noises and explanations, Max saying the phrase your love is fading Hu, part of the theme song for the nineteen fifty nine animated series Clutch Cargo, and he then said I still see the X. This was a reference to the last episode of that show. He also started rambling randomly about the files and explained that he had made a giant masterpiece for the Greatest World Newspaper nerds. WGN's call letters actually stood for World's Greatest Newspaper. Could have just mixed up there, and he was describing sharing dirty gloves with his brother. After a crude video edit, the person had mostly off screen at this point. He had his partially exposed, but talks visible from the side with a female figure wearing a French made costume what appears to be a mask. This is on the right side of the frame. She is spanking him with the fly'swater and he was holding the mask out there for a second before that and scream and I know they're coming, make it stop. The female, like I said, figure was spanking him fly'swater. The image faded into static, then viewers were returned to the doctor who broadcast this is a total interruption about ninety seconds. Technicians at the stations could not counteract to takeover because there were no engineers on duty when this happened. So this is a SEARS tower now known as Willis Tower. I guess where the station's broadcast tower is located. According to the station spokesperson, technicians monitoring the transmission from the headquarters attempted to take countermeasures but couldn't The director recalled that as the content got weirder, we got increasingly stressed out about our inability to do anything. The pirate broadcast actually ended because the pirates transmitting ended it. By the time the people really got into looking what was going on, it was already over with. They received a bunch of phone calls about this. Then some experts. FCC gets involved in stuff, and the broadcast intrusion was archived by sending a more powerful microwave transmission to the station's broadcast towers than the stations were sending themselves, triggering a capture effect. This was a difficult task in nineteen eighty seven, but was possible before American television stations switched from analog to digital signals in two thousand and nine. But even so, we've seen things happen with the digital signals. It's just not quite as easy to do, I guess. Experts have said that this stunt required extensive technical expertise and a significant amount of transmitting power, and that the pirate broadcast likely originated from in the line of sight of both station broad broadcast towers. No one has ever claimed responsibility for this. There's a lot of speculation now up there about the identity of this Max person. Really, nothing solid has ever come out of this. People have said it's former employees upset with the station. People have tried to connect it to various other people. Nothing's ever come of it. Soon after the investigation, FCC official quoted it in news, reporting that perpetrators would phase A five, which excuse me, face a maximum fine of ten thousand dollars and up to a year in prison. However, the five year statute limitation has done long past. No one's ever been identified in the case of who did this? I love that so much. I guess it's crazy and messed up, right, but I love how like crazy early television, you know, eighties television was out, like there's no security at all. You just needed a lot of electrical power and an antenna and you could blow out their transmission and take it over. That's so crazy. Yeah, what happened where it didn't really work? The first time? I get somebody was there working. First of all, they're able to counter it, but it's like the audio didn't go through. I guess it must be when you're intercepting a signal. Maybe it varies. I think they had just enough power to get on the screen, but not enough to blow out their audio entirely. Do you think this is scary to some people watching it? Absolutely? Yeah, I mean it's crazy. This is a crazy person doing this. I mean, obviously whoever did it is slightly unhinged. And so you have a person that has it's like the Joker and in Batman he takes over the airwaves at one point and he does a broadcast like this in the mac Michael Keaton Batman. I thank even So, yeah, this is a crazy person would do and if they actually applied themselves, they could be a terrifying person. Yeah, we got a lot of comments saying things like that unstable person. Then people are asking why would they come forward now? Right like it's all done. They can't get ruble for it. Nobody had a clay responsibility for it though it seems like something you'd be like, oh, I did that. You know it's crazy, as I'm sure you are. Besides the people who did it, I'm sure that there are a lot of people in deeper par pockets of the Internet who know who did it. And I don't understand why no one's coming forward. That is super weird because there's more than just the people who were there who know guaranteed they probably told somebody at some point. A lot of people are so sure it's an inside job. I'm not so sure. Yeah. So, like you mentioned early on in the HBO thing which happened like the year before or something like that, Yeah, so that was a guy who who did run like another station and he just sucked hijack. Yeah, he hijacked their signal to you know, everything like that. So like these people probably had access to some stuff and they just decided to use it for something crazy, Like they weren't like part of WGN or was WGN Is that right? The first one is WGN, the second was wttw okay Yeah, yeah, so I don't believe they were affiliated with either of those two stations, but they were definitely people who worked at somewhat other stations because they knew at least the broadcasting power. So when I was researching the HBO in the incident that happened here before, they were talking about how there for a while they were like both amping up their power to see who it who could take over the frequency, but HBO actually backed off because they were worried that it would blow their trans I get like blow a transmit or I don't know how to describe it. They're worried that it would damage their satellite if they continue to up their power. So that's why, I mean, that's why they like let it go. Yeah, it's really crazy, And like I said, that's something I really like about that era of TV and radio and stuff like that. Radio is still saying what you can build a little FM transmitter and then pump in a lot of electricity and you'll overpower the local FM radio. They gather his HBO got like a one year probation in his ham radio license second way for a year or something like that. That sounds about right. Yeah, you see, it's weird like these uh these uh finds and like everything seems a little low. But after but because of the HBO thing, they made a federal offense. Oh did they? Yeah, so that's why the person didn't come forward then yeah, but now so long later, it's like, why why would you not do that? Let's talk about the obscene gestures he was doing though, Luke, that was gross, Like it's a gross thing to do. It's a gross person to do that. And light because you're you don't know who's gonna be watching this. Granted this was at like eleven o'clock at night and but eleven twenty, but this was still a PBS station like oh broadcasting dish. They entered a couple kids. They interviewed like a bunch of different people, like I saw news reports. Some people were like it was funny. Some people were basically called them terrorists. Some people were kids are staying, they're scared. There's like a bunch of different It was a mixed reaction, but some people were legitimately freaked out. So here's the thing. These people are deliberately doing weird, gross stuff like that when they know it was a good chance to a kid is going to be on the other side of that, and so yeah, that's a terrifyingly gross thing to do. It's a weird thing to do. I just think it's funny that it was even impossible to be done. Like it's you know, technology has changed so much. They like you said, it can still technically be done in some instances, but it's a lot harder. That's definitely pumped a lot of power. I saw one where this had happened in the last fifteen years I believe. Oh where was it. I don't know. If it's a Montana, I don't know. But somebody was able to hijack like the emergency system. So it came on or like you know, like public service like emergency service announcement, and they said the zombies. They basically said the dead was coming back to alive. The person caught and got in trouble. But so it's still possible, but it definitely seems like what it was analog that was kind of like a free for all. Yeah, I remember when that happened. Actually, well I don't remember the year obviously, but I remember hearing about it. That reminds me of another story in Hawaii when it wasn't someone hijacked the emergency broadcasts, but someone made a mistake with the emergency broadcast and they broadcasted a nuke was on the way. Wow. And this happened I think maybe six or seven years ago. It wasn't very long ago now, and so a lot of people believed they were gonna die. So it caused about like it was like fifteen fifteen, twenty minutes of just pure chaos. I had someone said, doctor who got a little more PG. Maybe I had to blur out the butt talks. Yeah, like I've seen the unboured video. Oh at one point, so you did. I fear it's more appropriate. It's not really definitely get the point. You get the point. I mean, it's it's gross, it's weird. Why the hell do weird do that? Definitely several people involved, though there's a person filming it, just twisting the camera trying to create this effect. You got a person in a French made outfit, so there's not just one person behind it. Yeah, and the French maid was definitely a female person. Yes, weeah. People were really You could basically come to the conclusion this wasn't live. It was recorded because the cut in the video. Yeah, I guess the creepy part is the scary part is what was the purpose? Was there a message they were trying to give or because nobody really got it. People have their opinion on things. But I think it was a narcissistic sociopath kind of saying like they were just like, hey, we could do this. These people are stupid. We can just do this ourselves and mess with everybody, and they think they knew was working to counter it. I think so yeah, I think that they knew well, they probably guessed that nobody was gonna be there, and they probably figured, well, we got enough juice, we can pull this off, and we'll be legends because everybody's gonna be talking about us for the next thirty years people still are. Do you think the scary part is that this could be done though? Like what else could happen? Yeah? Because, like you know, they could have done stuff that you have more malicious if they wanted to. Yeah, they showed a definite flaw in the system and all you needed was power and you could do ever you want. You may never know. It's like Cooper, they're playing guy will never know, you know. Yeah, so say like that may he may be a future story right there. Yeah, there you go. Uh, good one. I enjoyed that one. I did too. I was I didn't know that's what you were gonna go do, and I'm really excited about it. I'm glad that one. And what's the one with? Yeah, it's awesome. Jeff Townsend Media sees you good night, and the question is do I stay here? Will you be back? Are you gonna come back? Will you be back? Are you coming back?
