The entire intrusion lasted for about 28 seconds and was cut off when engineers at WGN changed the frequency of the signal linking the broadcast studio to the station's transmitter atop the John Hancock Center. Home viewers' screens went black for about fifteen seconds, then displayed the footage of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses rocking erratically in front of a rotating corrugated metal panel that mimicked the real Max Headroom's geometric background effect accompanied by a staticky and garbled buzzing sound. The first intrusion took place during the sports segment of WGN-TV's The Nine O'Clock News.

īoth Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incidents took place on local Chicago television stations on the night of Sunday, November 22, 1987.įile:WGN-TV 'Max Headroom' Incident' (1987).webm The video ended with the person's exposed buttocks being spanked by a woman with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed.ĭespite an FCC investigation and decades of speculation, the culprits were never caught and have not been positively identified. The masked person spoke throughout this intrusion and made references to Max Headroom's endorsement of Coca-Cola, the TV series Clutch Cargo, WGN anchor Chuck Swirsky and 'all the greatest world newspaper nerds', a reference to WGN's call letters, which stand for 'World's Greatest Newspaper'.

The second incident occurred around two hours later during PBS affiliate WTTW's broadcast of Doctor Who and lasted for about 90 seconds. During this intrusion, the person in the mask swayed erratically and was accompanied by a strange buzzing noise. The first incident took place during the sports segment of WGN-TV's 9:00 p.m. The Max Headroom signal hijacking occurred on the night of November 22, 1987, when the television broadcasts of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, United States, were hijacked in an act of broadcast piracy by a video of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume, accompanied by distorted audio and with a corrugated metal panel swiveling in the background to mimic Max Headroom's geometric background effect. The unidentified hijacker dressed to resemble Max Headroom in the pirate broadcast

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