The Max Headroom signal hijacking (also known as the Max Headroom incident) was a hijacking of the television signals of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, on November 22, 1987, that briefly sent a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume to thousands of home viewers. It was one of the first and only successful TV signal hijackings in the U.S.
The first incident took place during the sports segment of independent TV station WGN-TV’s 9:00 p.m. newscast and featured a person wearing a mask swaying erratically in front of a semi-swiveling corrugated metal panel, apparently meant to resemble Max Headroom’s animated geometric background. Unlike the later intrusion, the only sound was a loud buzz. In total, the interruption went on for almost 30 seconds before engineers at WGN were able to regain control of their broadcast tower.
The second incident occurred about two hours later during PBS member station WTTW’s broadcast of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock. With nobody on duty at the affected tower, this signal takeover was more sustained and included distorted but audible speech. The masked figure made reference to the real Max Headroom’s advertisements for New Coke, the animated TV series Clutch Cargo, WGN sportscaster Chuck Swirsky, “Greatest World Newspaper nerds,” and other seemingly unrelated topics. The video concluded with the masked figure presenting his bare buttocks to a woman with a flyswatter while yelling “They’re coming to get me!,” with the woman responding “Bend over, bitch!” and lightly spanking him with it as the figure was crying and screaming. At that point, the hijackers ended the pirate transmission, and normal programming resumed after a total interruption of about 90 seconds.
The broadcast intrusion was achieved by sending a more powerful microwave transmission to the stations’ broadcast towers than the stations were sending themselves, triggering a capture effect. Experts have said that the stunt required extensive technical expertise and a significant amount of transmitting power, and that the pirate broadcast likely originated from somewhere in the line of sight of both stations’ broadcast towers, which were atop two tall buildings in downtown Chicago. While the prank was difficult to accomplish in 1987, it became almost impossible to replicate after American television stations switched from analog to digital signals in 2009.
No one has ever claimed responsibility for the stunt. Speculation about the identities of “Max” and his co-conspirators has centered on the theories that the prank was either an inside job by a disgruntled employee (or former employee) of WGN or was carried out by members of Chicago’s underground hacker community. However, despite an official law enforcement investigation in the immediate aftermath of the incident and many unofficial investigations, inquiries, and online speculation in the ensuing decades, the identities and motives of the hijackers remain a mystery.
Soon after the intrusion, an FCC official was quoted in news reporting that the perpetrators faced a maximum fine of $100,000 and up to a year in prison. However, the five-year statute of limitations was surpassed in 1992; as such, the people responsible for the intrusion would no longer face criminal punishment should their identities be revealed.
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