It’s 9:00 pm on November 22, 1987. And the people of Chicago Illinois were winding down in front of the TV while watching the sports segment on WGN-TV’s live news show. Out of nowhere, the screen goes black and 15 seconds later is replaced with a masked stranger swaying erratically with a spinning corrugated iron background and a strange buzzing noise. The mask the man was wearing resembled British TV personality Max Headroom, with a pair of sunglasses hiding his eyes. The video lasted 28 seconds and then disappeared, resuming the news segment that was previously playing. Upon returning the sports anchor Dan Roan commented “Well, if you’re wondering what’s happened, so am I” and joked that the computer running the news took off and went wild. But those 28 seconds were just the trial run, and the man behind the mask was only warming up.
2 hours and 20 minutes later, local PBS station WTTW was the next target. While airing the latest episode of Doctor Who, the screen went black. It then reappeared with our masked friend back at it, in front of his corrugated iron backdrop. This time however the masked man was speaking. The audio was distorted and pitch-shifted to sound higher, but if listened to carefully, the words can just be made out. Check the video out for yourself below.
Transcript
He starts the video in his standard swaying motion, then starts to talk. He says the following “He’s a frickin nerd. I think I’m better than Chuck Swirsky, frickin Liberal!” He then giggles & moans followed by “Oh Jesus!“
He shouts “Yeah!” while Holding a Pepsi can, then yells the New Coke slogan “Catch the wave!“. He then shouts “Your love is fading!” which is possibly a reference to The Temptations song ” I’m Losing You” he then Hums the theme to the old TV cartoon Clutch Cargo. Then points to the camera and says “I still see the X!“. giggles and then continues humming the Clutch Cargo theme song. Until he mutters “Oh, my piles!”
He continues to giggle and laugh before saying “Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds” Puts on an old dirty glove saying “My brother is wearing the other one. it’s dirty!” Takes off the glove and throws it aside.
The screen then clips to a new angle where he now has the mask off in his hand with a finger through the mouth and shouts “They’re coming to get me” to which the woman now sharing the video with him says “Bend over bitch!” He then turns around showing his uncovered rear which then gets spanked by the woman in the video. He screams “Aah make it stop” which becomes a distorted drone and then the video cuts out.
Thoughts
The succession of references in the video is quite disorientating, but from what I can gather these are the main ones. Firstly he calls out Chuck Swirsky, who is a sportscaster for WGN, as being a liberal. He then mentions the coke slogan Catch the Wave, which is actually the ad campaign that the real Max Headroom was featured on. Then in the comment about making a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds. This is probably a call to WGN again since WGN stands for Worlds Greatest Newspaper.
According to technicians for the WTTW studio, at that time of night, no engineers were on duty and thus the broadcaster was unable to do anything about the footage. As the footage got weirder, the broadcaster started to panic. When they eventually arrived at the station, it was too late, and the video had ended. So how was this actually achieved?
According to the broadcaster, broadcast piracy like this is fairly simple to do… if you know what you’re doing and you have the right equipment. The intrusions can be done by sending a more powerful transmission to the two stations’ broadcast towers than the station is sending themselves. The pirate intrusion would have had to have happened in the line of sight of the two towers, which would have been a rooftop nearby. To this day we still have no idea who the masked man was or what his motives behind the piracy acts were. At the time he would have faced a fine of up to $100 000 and up to a year in prison. The intrusion became a popular topic on forums like Reddit, where speculations ran wild with some saying it was a disgruntled ex-WGN employee and others saying it was one of Chicago’s underground hacker communities. One or two culprits claimed the hack, but soon withdrew their statements, and law enforcement investigations came up empty-handed.
My thoughts are that this was just a sort of prank pulled off to just prove that it can be done. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was done by someone employed by the station. It also appears like the video was recorded before the broadcast because it jumps between the two scenes. What are your thoughts?