Without warning, a loud harsh atonal static sound overwhelmed the speakers and a man in a Max Headroom mask appeared on screen manically dancing for about 20 seconds before WGN regained control of their airwaves and cut back to the news. It was a run-of-the-mill broadcast until the screen suddenly went black for about ten seconds at about 9:14 p.m. news, probably beaming that the Bears had defeated the Lions earlier that day. WGN sportscaster Dan Roan was on camera discussing the latest sports news on the 9 p.m. Eminem recently payed homage to the persona of Max Headroom for his 'Rap God' video that came out a few years ago.īut let's return to 1987.

State television stations across the Soviet Union were frequently taken over by pirate transmissions that overpowered transmissions from relay stations.It's an iconic visual. And in 1986, supporters of the Polish labor movement Solidarność hijacked state television stations with printed anti-government messages. The first major one took place in 1977, when someone interrupted the audio of an ITV Southern Television broadcast from a tower in Hannington, England, with a message purported to be from an alien representative of an 'Intergalactic Association.' The message warned, 'All your weapons of evil must be removed… You have but a short time to learn to live together in peace.'Īs with the Chicago takeover, the Hannington broadcast tower was connected by a wireless uplink, not a hard-wired connection.

But the WTTW takeover lasted a full 90 seconds, and the pirate TV broadcast's audio, while distorted, was audible to anyone who happened to be tuned in.īroadcast intrusions were not rare in the 1980s. In the case of the WGN news broadcast, engineers were able to change the frequency used in the uplink to the John Hancock tower after a brief interruption, and the audio from the pirate transmission was drowned in static. The hack was made possible by the analog television broadcast technology of the day-the attacker was able to overpower the signals sent by the television studios to a broadcast antenna atop the John Hancock building in Chicago with his or her own signals.

Further Reading Hackers set off Dallas’ 156 emergency sirens over a dozen times

Max headroom mask