![]() The organization’s Phil Bradford told the media, “It is very serious and we’d like to inform anybody who is involved in this type of thing that it is serious and that we will take every step that we can to find out who is doing it. "People started asking me, ‘Well, so in the upcoming election, who are you who are you taking in 1988?’ You know, ‘What are your views on this, this and this?’ You know, I just want to be a guy, just a guy on the street." The Federal Communications Commission launched a criminal investigation, but the perpetrators were never identified. "I had a couple of friends tell me … ‘You better seek protection.’ Whoever did this had to be pretty smart and sharp to do what he did," he recalled. Swirsky found himself at the center of media attention for all the wrong reasons. I really didn’t understand this whole Max Headroom phenomenon. ![]() “‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Max Headroom!’ ‘Yeah, what about Max Headroom?’ ‘Well, I mean, he mentioned you!’ I said, ‘What’d he say?’ ‘He said you were a freakin' liberal.’ … I thought it was a practical joke!. ![]() “‘Hey, did you just hear … ’ or ‘Did you see?’” he was asked. In 2019 Swirsky told the Endless Thread podcast that he was inundated with calls after the interruption, which he didn't watch. And probably a combination of at least two of those in order to pull this off.” “And as the content got weirder, we got increasingly stressed out about our inability to do anything about it.” Colleague Al Skierkiewicz added that “it had to be a broadcast engineer, a satellite engineer or a ham radio operator. “All of a sudden we don’t have Doctor Who on the air-we have this Max Headroom mask,” he said. WTTW broadcast director Paul Rizzo later recalled his horror as the moment unfolded. Together, the event made headlines across the world and became known as the Max Headroom signal hijacking – even though the Headroom element was nothing more than a mask. A little earlier, local news station WGN-TV experienced a 30-second outage when the same figure appeared, although no sound was broadcast at that time. It was the second intervention of the evening. ![]() “Oh, do it!” were the last words heard as the hack ended and replaced by Fourth Doctor Tom Baker back in the lighthouse, announcing, “As far as I can tell, a massive electric shock – he died instantly.” He put on a glove, saying his brother had the other one, made a comment about “world newspaper nerds” and then said, “Whoa! They’re coming to get me!” as he disappeared off-screen and was replaced by a man bending over, revealing his naked ass, which was then slapped by a woman. He’s a frickin’ nerd!” followed by references to local sports commentator Chuck Swirsky, Headroom’s recent commercial for Coca-Cola and words that were difficult to follow. In those seconds, the masked man spoke apparent gibberish, starting with, “That does it. 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.But it wasn’t really Headroom, played by Matt Frewer, who recently found fame with the character that hosted from “20 minutes into the future.” It was someone wearing a Headroom mask, who proceeded to clown around on the hacked airwaves for about 90 seconds. 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. ![]() To this day, the perpetrators of the television hack remain unknown. Who on the Chicago public television station WTTW. The "broadcast intrusion" interrupted a primetime news broadcast from Chicago's WGN, and then (more successfully) the 11:00pm broadcast of Dr. Thirty years ago today, a person or persons unknown briefly hijacked the signal of two Chicago television stations, broadcasting a bizarre taped message from a man wearing a Max Headroom mask. ![]()
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