Imagine: You settle down to watch your favorite television program, things are proceeding as planned, when all of a sudden your screen fills with...this:
Well, that was the experience of thousands of Chicago-area residents in 1987, when an unknown TV troll pulled off what is possibly the greatest and most enigmatic hacking incident in American history:
The Max Headroom signal hijacking occurred on the night of November 22, 1987, when 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.
For those who weren't around at the time, Max Headroom was a popular character in a variety of media franchises and ad campaigns from the 1980s; he was portrayed by character actor Matt Frewer as an artificial intelligence broadcaster:
Somebody in Chicago liked the Headroom character enough to risk a major federal response by portraying him in a hacked broadcast:
The first incident took place during the sports segment of independent TV station WGN-TV's 9:00 p.m. newscast. Like the later signal intrusion, it featured a person wearing a mask swaying erratically in front of a swiveling corrugated metal panel apparently meant to resemble Max Headroom's animated geometric background. ... This interruption went on for almost 30 seconds before engineers at WGN were able to regain control of their broadcast tower.
The first "incident" was without sound save for a monotonous buzzing, which is extremely creepy as it is. But a later hack actually included sound, and it was insanely chaotic enough to be even more disturbing:
The second incident occurred about two hours later during PBS member station WTTW's broadcast of Doctor Who. This signal takeover was more sustained, and the masked figure could be heard making reference to the real Max Headroom's advertisements for New Coke, the animated TV series Clutch Cargo, WGN sportscaster Chuck Swirsky, "World's Greatest Newspaper nerds", and other seemingly unrelated topics. The video concluded with a side view of someone's exposed buttocks being spanked by a woman with a flyswatter while a voice yelled "Oh no, they're coming to get me!" At that point, the pirate transmission ended and normal programming resumed after a total interruption of about 90 seconds.
Creeeepy.
Here, we present a sanitized version of the insane hacking video, one in which the "exposed buttocks" have been understandably excluded (as has an apparent sexual device that shows up on the hacker's finger at one point):
It's just nuts. And the craziest part? Thirty-five years later, whoever did this has never revealed himself and has never been caught:
No one has ever claimed responsibility for the stunt. Speculation about the identities of "Max" and his co-conspirators has centered around the theories that the prank was either an inside job by a disgruntled employee (or former employee) of WGN or was carried out by members of Chicago's underground hacker community. However, despite an official law enforcement investigation in the immediate aftermath of the incident and many unofficial investigations, inquiries, and online speculation in the ensuing decades, the identities and motives of the hijackers remain a mystery
Umm, "the motives of the hijackers remain a mystery?" Pretty sure they just wanted to broadcast a weird nonsense video on local Chicago television.
Meanwhile, they're still out there, unknown, undiscovered — just American legends, living in unidentified, weird glory. Hats off to them, whoever they are.
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