Two stations overpowered in one night, and nobody was ever found
On the night of Sunday, 22 November 1987, two Chicago television stations were hijacked about two hours apart, and thousands of homes across the metropolitan area briefly saw a stranger in a Max Headroom mask. Max Headroom was everywhere in the late 1980s: a computer-generated television journalist from a dystopian future ruled by media corporations, and a pitchman for New Coke.
The first intrusion came at 9:14 p.m., during the sports segment of WGN-TV's Nine O'Clock News, as Dan Roan narrated the day's Chicago Bears highlights. Screens went black, then showed a figure in the mask and sunglasses rocking erratically in front of a swivelling sheet of corrugated metal meant to mimic Max's geometric background, to a garbled buzz with no words. Engineers cut it off by changing the frequency of the link from the studio to the transmitter atop the John Hancock Center. Back on air, Roan remarked that if viewers were wondering what had happened, so was he.
At about 11:20 p.m. the same figure broke into WTTW, the PBS station, during the first part of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock, and this time there was sound. For roughly a minute and a half he rambled through jeers at a WGN sportscaster, a can of Pepsi held up while he quoted the Coca-Cola slogan Max had advertised, a snatch of the theme from the 1959 cartoon Clutch Cargo, and a joke about the World's Greatest Newspaper, the words behind WGN's call letters, ending in crude slapstick with a woman in a French maid costume and a flyswatter. Nobody was on duty at WTTW's transmitter in the Sears Tower, so the station could do nothing, and the broadcast ended only when the hijackers chose to stop.
The hijackers had sent a stronger microwave signal to the stations' towers than the stations themselves, a stunt experts say took real technical expertise and transmitting power. An FCC official said the culprits faced a fine of up to $100,000 and a year in prison, but the Federal Communications Commission's investigation never found them, and decades of unofficial inquiry and online theorising have not either. The five-year statute of limitations ran out in 1992, so whoever did it could now come forward without facing charges. The Max Headroom motif lives on, borrowed by the hacker collective Anonymous in its videos.
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