The incident may have required the resources and knowledge of a television engineer. Strutzel continued, “It’s not the kind of thing that’s done by somebody in his basement … It’s sophisticated microwave equipment at high-power levels to overcome our installation. He told the Sun-Times that it was “pretty apparent it was local.” Robert Strutzel was WGN’s engineering director at the time. The list of signal jackings goes on, and they still happen occasionally today-the more modern instances are often likely to be inside jobs, some disgruntled employee flipping a final middle finger at The Man.Īs far as Max Headroom was concerned, many have believed through the years that the pranks (let’s face it, that’s what they were-prosecutable pranks) were indeed the work of someone mad enough to attempt embarrassing Chicago media. He was fined $5000 and given a year of unsupervised probation. On April 26, 1986, Captain Midnight cracked HBO’s satellite signal to broadcast color bars and this complaint: “GOODEVENING HBO FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT $12.95/MONTH ? NO WAY ! ” The good captain turned out to be an electrical engineer named John MacDougall. Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” It took three years, but police finally fingered an unsurprising culprit-a Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) engineer named Thomas Haynie. In September 1987 someone interrupted two adult cable channels with a religious message: “Thus sayeth the Lord thy God. It was probably a coincidence, but the Chicago broadcast interruption took place almost exactly 10 years after Vrillon intoned its message on English TV. In 1977, for example, the alien voice of Vrillon took over a channel in the UK. Past hijackers were caught and sometimes paid the price, others got away with it. In a Chicago Sun-Times article published a day later, the paper reported the joker would have faced “up to $100,000 in fines and a year in jail” if caught. I say “cold case” because yes, hijacking a broadcast signal is a crime. In no time at all, the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion became a cold case and an object lesson in how to pull off a kind of gleefully weird form of hacking. He had a woman in a maid’s outfit use a flyswatter on his bare butt. He mocked WGN and broadcaster Chuck Swirsky. Max scatted the theme to Clutch Cargo, a short-lived (but super-popular) cartoon that ran between 19. The video is both self-evident and perplexing. Big Head Max hijacked the broadcast signal of public TV station WTTW, taking over during a broadcast of Doctor Who. The longer intrusion happened after eleven.
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