Good evening. I was working the night shift at WTTW back in November '87. PBS station out of Chicago, you know. I'd been there about two years at that point, doing technical work, maintaining equipment, that sort of thing. Sunday nights were usually quiet. Dead, really. November 22nd started normal enough. I remember because it was freezing that night, typical Chicago November. I'd grabbed coffee on my way in, burned my tongue on it. Anyway, we were broadcasting Doctor Who that night. Horror of Fang Rock, I think it was called. Around eleven fifteen at night, I'm monitoring the feed from our control room when something goes wrong with the picture. At first I thought it was just technical trouble. The screen started flickering, you know, like when you lose signal. But then it cut to this image that I'll never forget. This guy in a Max Headroom mask, rubber thing with sunglasses, swaying back and forth in front of this rotating corrugated metal background. The whole thing had this low, buzzing hum to it.
Now, Max Headroom was a big deal back then. There was a TV show, commercials for New Coke, the whole thing. But this wasn't the real Max. This was someone wearing a cheap mask, and the voice was all distorted, garbled. He started rambling, making these weird references. Called some WGN sportscaster a liberal, hummed the theme song to Clutch Cargo, complained about hemorrhoids. I'm sitting there in the control room with two other guys, and we're all just frozen. We knew immediately this wasn't supposed to be happening. on shift when that happened must have been intense - Zane' One of the engineers tried to cut the feed, switch to backup, anything. But we had a problem. Nobody was stationed at the Sears Tower that night. That's where our transmitter was, way up on top of the building. Without anyone there, we couldn't override the signal. The whole thing lasted about 90 seconds, but it felt like forever. This masked guy kept going, getting weirder and weirder. At one point he dropped his pants, showed his backside to the camera. There was a woman there too, looked like she was wearing a French maid outfit or something, and she started spanking him with a flyswatter. He's yelling 'They're coming to get me!' and she's saying something back to him. Then it just cut out. Static for a second, and we were back to Doctor Who like nothing happened.
The phones lit up immediately. I mean immediately. Viewers calling in, asking what the hell they just saw. Some people were angry, thought we'd shown nudity on public television. Others were just confused. One guy told us he wanted to bust his TV set over it. What people don't understand is how hard this was to pull off. You can't just hijack a broadcast signal with some Radio Shack equipment. Whoever did this had to overpower our transmission with a stronger microwave signal. That means serious hardware, expensive stuff. We're talking maybe 25,000 dollars worth of equipment, minimum. And they had to be within line of sight of the Sears Tower transmitter. That's 1,454 feet up in downtown Chicago. The next morning, the FCC was all over us. FBI too. They wanted to know everything. How it happened, who had access, what kind of equipment it would take. Our engineers explained it had to be someone with serious technical knowledge. A broadcast engineer, satellite engineer, maybe a ham radio operator. Probably a combination of at least two of those skill sets to pull something like this off.
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