Way back in 1987 when payphones were as plentiful as cell phones are today, an incident occurred in Chicago when someone posing as Max Headroom hijacked the broadcast signal for WGN-TV to broadcast a video of themselves in a Max Headroom mask. There was no audio. They were on the air for about 30 minutes until their broadcast engineer switch to another frequency.
The same night around 11:15 “Max Headroom” interrupted the signal for WTTW. This time there was audio and he stayed on the air for the duration of his video.
One of big theories about this is an employee for WGN may have done this. A stunt like this requires technical know-how and some professional equipment.
There was a similar incident involving HBO about a year earlier when a guy who worked for a Pay-Per-View type channel, (Captain Midnight) aimed a satellite to HBO to broadcast a message. He was eventually caught and went on to selling satellite dishes.
As for the Max Headroom guy nobody was ever caught.
The questions are who did and why. I think the statute of limitations should be expired by now, giving the guy the opportunity to come to explain why he did. The weird part is WGN managed to knock him off the air quickly, however the folks at WTTW couldn’t knock him off the air in time. Why did “Max” target 2 stations in one night. Hell, why didn’t he try to ‘jack all the stations in Chicago and go for the record? Could this have been the work of a rival TV station? Maybe he was testing to see how the TV stations would react, something similar to what corporation do when their computer networks are hacked.
Some people hail this as a pre-internet troll.
MIB
