In the control room of WGN-TV, the technicians on duty stared blankly at their screens. It was from their studio, located at Bradley Place in the north of the city, that the network broadcasted its microwave transmission to an antenna at the top of the 100-story John Hancock tower, seven miles away, and then out to tens of thousands of viewers. Time seemed to slow to a trickle as they watched that signal get hijacked.

That night, as usual, Dan Roan, a popular local sportscaster on Channel 9's Nine O'Clock News, was narrating highlights of the Bears' victory over the Detroit Lions. And then, suddenly and without warning, the signal flickered up and out into darkness.

At 9:16 PM, just after the faux Max intruded on WGN's signal, technicians there, suspecting an inside job, began scouring the building for a possible assailant. But Max wasn't there. And he wasn't finished.

Still, the effect of Max's perpetually skipping, computerized face was hard to forget. The result not of computers but of painstaking make-up and prosthetics on top of the comedian Matt Frewer, Max was a dark parody of real-life TV newscasters in a television landscape where news and entertainment were already bleeding into each other. Max Headroom was the cyberpunk on mainstream TV, imagining a digital world that turned out to be not very far from 1987. (The dateline on every episode was "twenty minutes into the future.") By the time the show was canceled, the sarcastic square-jawed fake-rendered mug was as well known to the cult TV viewers of the late 80s as the Guy Fawkes mask is to the people of Twitter today.

Max Headroom, which featured the exploits of a TV journalist living in a dystopian future, with a digital alter ego in the form of the title character, debuted on March 31, 1987. In Chicago, it aired on the ABC affiliate Channel 7, and would last for 11 episodes and into a brief second season that fall, before it was canceled, beaten in the ratings by Miami Vice.

To many clued-in TV viewers that night, the face of Max Headroom would have been unmistakable. "The world's first computer-generated TV host," as he might have proudly boasted, was a sharp-tongued character inaugurated in 1985 as the veejay for a British music television show. His sarcastic wit and stuttering delivery—along with an ad campaign for New Coke , a late-night talk show on Cinemax, and a few TV specials—had made him a cult personality even before he finally earned his own hour-long TV show in the US.

Within hours, federal officials would be called in to investigate one of the strangest crimes in TV history—a rare broadcast signal intrusion, with no clear motive, method, or culprits. It may as well have come from another dimension.

Finally someone switched the uplink frequencies, and the studio zapped back to the screen. There was Roan, at his desk in the studio, smiling at the camera, dumbfounded.

A squat, suited figure sputtered into being, and bounced around maniacally. Wearing a ghoulish rubbery mask with sunglasses and a frozen grin, the mysterious intruder looked like a cross between Richard Nixon and the Joker. Static hissed through the signal; behind him, a slab of corrugated metal spun hypnotically. This was not part of the regularly scheduled broadcast.

"I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds," he added, making another apparent dig at Chicago's television establishment. The call sign of the station, WGN, was an abbreviation for "World's Greatest Newspaper," a slogan borrowed from the early days of the Chicago Tribune, the newspaper that owned the station.

"Your love is fading!" he shouts, before throwing the phallus to the floor. "I still see the X!" he says, a direct reference to the title of the last episode of Cargo .

"He's a frickin nerd," Max says, in a voice that sounds like a cartoon villain. Then, "I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky, frickin Liberal!" referring to the Chicago Bulls announcer who was then WGN Radio's go-to sportscaster. The metal panel spinning hypnotically behind him was a cheap, clever knock-off of Max Headroom's bitmapped "computer"-generated studio. Wielding what looks like a rubber penis, the prankster yells the New Coke slogan—"Catch the wave!"—and hums the theme to the 1960s gonzo TV cartoon Clutch Cargo.

Almost exactly two hours later, at around 11:15 PM, Channel 11, the PBS affiliate WTTW, was airing an episode of Dr. Who called "The Horror of Fang Rock" when a gargle of static cut in. Scan lines, indicating the beginning of a VHS recording, flashed across the screen. Unlike the previous thirty-second hacking, this one had audio, just barely coherent amid the whirr of distortion. It lasted for one minute and twenty-two seconds.

At both WGN and WTTW, phones began ringing off the hook from confused and sympathetic viewers. For the next few days, the tale of the hack went viral. Local newspapers and newscasts covered the incident with a mix of suspense and bemusement. (The Tribune's headline: "Powerful Video Prankster c-c-c-could become Max Jailroom.") WGN made it their top story, and titled it "TV VIDEO PIRATE."

"By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over," a spokesman for WTTW, which is located about two miles to the southeast of WGN, told the Tribune . For thousands of Chicago residents, it was already too late. The invention of the World Wide Web wasjust a few years away, but for a few moments that night, thousands of viewers simultaneously caught a glimpse of a kind of proto troll, a hacker who had managed, somehow, to hijack Chicago's broadcast signals, not once but twice.

Then the camera cuts to Max from a slightly new angle, facing off screen and bent over. His mask dangles near the camera; his face is off screen and his buttocks are hanging out, front and center. "They're coming to get me!" he screams. On the right side of the screen, a woman lazily spanks his ass with a flyswatter. "Come get me bitch!" he yells. The scream becomes a distorted, symphonic drone. And then just as quickly as his arrival, the signal cuts out, and Chicago was back to the eerie quiet of the regularly scheduled Dr. Who episode.

That law was a new one, prompted largely by a growing fear among communications experts and law enforcement officials. At the time of the Headroom hack, broadcast signal intrusions were considered a rare phenomenon, limited to small stations with lower power transmissions, and requiring special knowledge and equipment that was estimated to cost up to a hundred thousand dollars.

The government was unamused. Officials from the FCC, the agency responsible for regulating America's airwaves, pledged to track down the mysterious culprits and bring them to justice. Agents from the FBI's Chicago field office would soon join the investigation. "I would like to inform anybody involved in this kinda thing, that there's a maximum penalty of $100,000, one-year in jail, or both," Phil Bradford, an FCC spokesman, told a reporter the following day. "All in all, there are some who may view this as comical," WTTW spokesman Anders Yocom said. "But it is a very serious matter because illegal interference of a broadcast signal is a violation of federal law. "

"I got so upset that I wanted to bust the TV set," a man in a jacket and tie told the reporter. One young woman, apparently a fan of Dr. Who, was unimpressed. "We're going to have to tape over it," she whined. An older man compared the incident to a hooligan throwing a brick through a window. A young boy grinned at the reporter. "Very, very funny," he said.

But the prospect of a new form of pranksterism—or protest, or even terrorism—began to emerge a year and a half earlier, on April 27, 1986. That night HBO aired The Falcon and the Snowman, the 1985 John Schlesinger movie based on the true story of an American intelligence contractor who sells secrets to the Soviets. At around thirty two minutes past midnight, the screen flickered into color bars, with a message superimposed on top:

At the end of his night shift, finishing a broadcast of Pee-wee's Big Adventure for the now defunct network People's Choice, MacDougall flipped the dish in the direction of the satellite that carried HBO, Galaxy 1, and broadcast his message, overpowering the network's signal. He explained to investigators that he was frustrated at the network's rising fees, which hurt his other business, selling satellite TV equipment . After pleading guilty to charges of transmitting without a radio license, a violation of federal law, MacDougall paid a $5,000 fine and served a year-long probation.

Within days, FCC investigators had found their intruder. Captain Midnight was a satellite technician named John MacDougall, whose mistake had apparently been to use a relatively uncommon text generator program to display the text on screen, a clue that led FCC investigators to MacDougall's employer, Central Florida Teleport, a satellite uplink company in Ocala, Florida.

Lasting four and a half minutes, the message from Captain Midnight was America's first-known broadcast signal intrusion . HBO executives refused to publicly discuss the incident—a protest of the network's recently-announced price hike—and experts worried that the hack presaged a dark future for broadcasters, for the country's satellite infrastructure, and for the viewing public. "In the wrong hands, this new form of jamming would be no laughing matter," intoned a reporter for ABC News.

He was also instrumental in catching Captain Midnight and the Playboy TV hacker, experiences he remembers with equal doses of relish and disgust, as much for the bureaucratic challenges involved as for the "lunatic" hackers he was after. To Marcus, who now runs a telecom consultancy in Washington, the Headroom hacker was still "a bad guy" and "the one that got away." But, he said, it wasn't his fault.

The FBI report on the Headroom incident, which I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, was written by Dr. Michael Marcus, who was then the assistant bureau chief in the FCC's Field Operations Bureau and the lead investigator. An expert in the mechanics of TV hacking and radio transmission technology, Marcus joined the FCC in 1979, and began to play an instrumental role in proposing and developing policies for advanced radio technologies. Before he retired in 2004, he braved industry opposition to help the FCC unleash technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the commercial spectrum.

In September 1987, Playboy TV was hijacked with fanatical text messages telling surprised onanists at home to repent and find Jesus. The FBI identified the hacker as Thomas Haynie, a technician employed by the Christian Broadcasting Network. Haynie was caught and convicted under the new satellite jamming law , and sentenced to probation.

There was some ambiguity in the case, specifically about whether the federal misdemeanor charge made against him, as a violation under 47 USC 301 , "transmitting without a license," was applicable. McDougall in fact had a license to transmit. The following year, Congress passed 18 USC 1367 , which made satellite jamming a felony. That law was put to the test after another incident a year later, some two months before the Max Headroom intrusion.

"It did need a dish antenna," said Marcus, "but if they got close to the STL receiver antenna at the TV transmitter, than a Direct-TV-size antenna might have been adequate."

Marcus doubts that the hacker was using sophisticated, costly equipment, or that the equipment was even very large, as some said at the time. "I don't think it need be expensive," he said. "New, the gear might have cost around ten thousand dollars, but would have been available, used, on the amateur radio market. There is surplus equipment sold with this capability. I don't think it needed a few briefcases," he said.

The intruders would have simply had to switch on their transmission equipment at a high enough location, probably a high-rise apartment or a roof, at a place between the two studios and their downtown transmitters, somewhere on the North or Northwest Sides of Chicago. From there, they could blast the skyscraper receivers with high-power microwave frequencies, and by overriding the studios' signals, they could trick the transmitters into sending out their own signal. "I think the bad guy got close to the receiving end and just transmitted a signal that was received with a stronger strength than the more distant, intended signal," said Marcus.

In the case of the Max Headroom intrusion, the theory goes like this: the hacker managed to overpower the microwaves of the STL, which sat vulnerable to attack on a frequency that wouldn't have been hard to find, as they were being sent to the receivers atop the John Hancock Building and Sears Tower.

To find a signal hijacker, it helps to start with a physical location, to know from where the hijack began, and that requires knowing the path the signal was taking when it got hijacked. To spread their signals across a city local TV networks first relay their signals from their respective studios to high-powered transmitters on top of tall buildings. The connection between the TV studios and the transmitter is called the studio transmitter link, or STL.

"The head man in Chicago at the time"—an FCC investigator whom he wouldn't name—"said 'what am I supposed to do?' I said, 'You have the video — go to the place where you think it was filmed!'"

"The background looked to be about eight-feet wide, industrial type metal, maybe a roll-down warehouse door," he said. That would have already limited it to certain places in the city where the video could have been filmed. And one tip sounded particularly promising, said Marcus, one that pointed at a particular person, someone who worked for a company that had a warehouse-like space in the city, a place that might have played host to the video shoot.

The location of the intruders' signal was one thing; but teasing out where they had shot their video would fall to the videotape itself. It would provide, said Marcus, the most clues to the identity of the culprits, in large part because it was the only evidence at all the investigators had to work with.

FBI analysts enhanced frames from a broadcast quality U-Matic video cassette tape copy of the intrusion. Six dry-silver prints were taken from the video, according to a "Report of the FBI Technical Services Division," but it was noted that a first generation recording would be paramount for a better examination. It appears that they also attempted to enhance the "UPPER RIGHT HAND QUADRANT" of the video to get a better visual of Max's kinky accomplice.

While Marcus and other FCC agents worked out the likely technical scenario and then attempted to follow-up on tips, focusing on the north and northwestern parts of the city—the most likely area from which to interrupt the transmissions—the FBI carefully examined the videotape. At the very least, the bureau made photographic prints from it, a capability the FCC didn't yet have.

The tip seemed strong, but the investigators had no probable cause, no warrant. Just a hunch. Figuring it out would require going to the place to determine if anyone had seen anything unusual, and maybe in the process, to stumble upon their culprit or culprits. "It had to be someone who knew the technology," said Marcus, "maybe a broadcast techie, but there were other techies who could figure it out also."

But even with a likely geographical location, Marcus said, finding the resources and manpower needed to continue the investigation was a struggle. He was back in headquarters in DC, and the FCC investigator in Chicago was too timid to go investigating.

"Our man in Chicago didn't want to start knocking on doors," Marcus remembered, with disdain, without naming names. "He was used to more traditional FCC cases, and felt uncomfortable doing things he hadn't done before."

Momentum slowed: the case lacked evidence, and the threat felt ambiguous. "How are you going to lose sleep over something like that? Nobody dies, and there's no damage." There were fears at the time about the harm a satellite jammer might do to infrastructure that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but concerns about regular television signals were much lower. "Max Headroom wasn't a danger to public safety, or to a multimillion piece of equipment," Marcus said. "So the resources were a lot less."

Two days later, a separate Headroom hack occurred during the 10 PM news on Channel 5, WMAQ-TV. This time however it was a goofy prank by the program's sports anchor, Mark Giangreco, who spliced tape from the actual hack into his segment. "Did you see the FCC said they're going to analyze the signals and go right to the source and put this guy out of business?" the main anchor says snarkily. "Those are the same people who spent ten years trying to make Steve Dahl talk nice!" The trail had turned cold.

As I said before, it's one of those things that doesn't work out on paper. But it works. Welcome to Earth—Where everything you know is wrong.

While the tale of Max Headroom hacking into two Chicago TV stations in one night would be eclipsed by the death, a week later, of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, the theories began piling up online. The speculation that would eventually reach places like reddit began on Chicago's bulletin board systems, places with names like Ripco, Overdrive, and God's Country. On the Tolmes News Service BBS, dial-up "modemers" reacted to the signal intrusion with curiosity and awe and hacker pride. Two days later, at least one person, someone with the BBS handle "The Chamelion" (the author of a text file called "Computer Terror and Distruction" [sic]) seemed to know more.

87Nov24 6:18 am from The Chamelion This morning of ABC's World News This Morning, there was a story about all the broadcast overrides. We've gotten WGN, WWOR, and the superatation out of Kansas, KTAT, I believe. He said "The FCC is looking into how someone could intercept broadcasts". I've studied this for a long time, and believe me, it's not hard. Especially overriding superstations. They showed a videotape of what was transmitted. It was Bo A homemade Max Headroom. It was pretty neat. We'll strike again. I can guarantee it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 87Nov25 11:27 am from Milo Phonbil Who's "we", lizard-face? --------------------------------------------------------------------- 87Nov29 9:05 pm from The Slipped Disk So wait... How did these dudes in Chi town do it? I saw the transmission. Very witty. Inside job, you think? --------------------------------------------------------------------- 87Nov30 6:02 am from The Chamelion Hardly an inside job. They just aimed their transmitter at the same transponder that WGN uses, and used a higher power. It doesn't even have to be significantly higher. Just more, and the WGN signal will cancel out. As I said before, it's one of those things that doesn't work out on paper. But it works. Welcome to Earth--Where everything you know is wrong. ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Since the Headroom incident, the interception of broadcast signals has become a popular trope in hacker fantasies: Jack Nicholson's Joker inserts an ad for poisoned cosmetics in Batman (1989), Christian Slater builds a reputation around his own pirate radio talk show in Pump Up the Volume (1990), and in the beginning of Hackers (1995) the main character tells his mom he's "taking over a TV network." Broadcast intrusion is a central part of2005's V for Vendetta too_,_ and the opening of The Outer Limits warned, "Do not attempt to adjust your television set...We are controlling the transmission." Anonymous would even reference the Headroom hack directly in a 2008 video, during its campaign against Scientology.