It was an interesting evening on November 22, 1987 in Chicago, Illinois. TV viewers in that area got an unexpected interruption  while watching TV:

Max Headroom made an unannounced appearance on their TV screens not one but twice in a span of an evening to late night.

For those who do not know who Max Headroom he was the creation of writer and actor George Stone. Max was a character that only existed on TV and had a robotic voice. There was even a couple of TV series and a TV movie in the mid 1980’s based on the character:

Max Headroom was so popular that he even did a segment for Sesame Street!:

 

The Max Headroom incident happen almost 32 years ago and no one knows who was responsible for these random TV takeovers.

The facts are:

-They certain of is that two people were behind the incident.

-It happened twice only on November 22,1987.

-It effected only TV viewers in the Chicago, Illinois area.

-The two channels that were hacked into received hundreds of calls and complaints about the incident.

-The two interruptions were:

First was on Channel 9 (TV station WGN-TV). It happen when the 9’o clock news was showing the feature points of a Chicago Bears football game. It was around 9:14 pm when the Max Headroom take over took place. Even the news reporter on the screen seemed extremely confused as to what just happened:

The second time was on a different channel around the 11:30-midnight time frame. A PBS station (WTTW station) was showing a Dr.Who episode when it was also interrupted by the same team of people who hacked into the 9’o’ clock news hour. However this interruption had a distorted voice to go along with the Max Headroom that was on the screen. It was a little bit longer than the first interruption but even though this one had audio and had a little bit more random action. Whatever they were saying did not make sense at all.

During the second TV hack the fake Max Headroom was able to do a quick pug for Pepsi. Because at the time the fictionalized real Max Headroom had a sponsorship of Coke products. So I guess if you are going to be a fake version of a character you might as well root for their competitor:

Also there is a couple of seconds that you see the fake Max Headroom getting spanked. So they how they know there was a least two people involved in this.

 

Even though these interruptions happened twice in a span one evening the people who did this were never caught! The same news team that were victim to this TV interruption did a segment about what happen to them the very next day. They even referred this team of people as a video pirate:

Even with the threats of supposed heavy fines and possible jail time they were hardly any leads as to who could of done this. Even to this day I find this event so random and I consider it one of the most bizarre events that has ever happen.

 

 

Until next time!