The Max Headroom Incident

How did hackers take over a television signal in the late 1980s? Stuff You Should Know's Chuck Bryant joins the show to talk about the Max Headroom Incident.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from com Sis. Everyone.
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and today in
the studio, I am joined by a special guest host,
Chuck Bryant Chuff. Welcome to Text Stuff, Jonathan. Hi, Chuck Strickland.

(00:25):
That's weird calling you Jonathan. Yeah, that's fine, call me Strickland.
Josh called me strict, so you might as well keep
it going. Um now. I Chuck, of course, is one
of the hosts of Stuff you should know, and Josh
is the other host. We had him on earlier with
the Humanoid Robot episode. It went well, it went well great.

(00:46):
You know, Josh had to sit there and and wait
until I'd let him talk, and I would let him
and then he would he would talk. It was great.
I think I may fall into this role a little easier. Well.
The nice thing is that, you know, I like to
let my guests kind of pick a topic if they
if they prefer I mean, if they don't, if they

(01:08):
want me to pick one, I'm happy to. But I
gave you that that option, and you came back with
one of my favorite stories period, not just in tech
just it's just one of those cool weird things that
have happened, and I do not want to steal thunder.
All I wanna ask you is, Chuck, if you were
in Chicago on November twenty and you were watching h

(01:36):
w g N at nine pm because you you want
to check out the news and it's coming up on
the sports, which I know you're a fan of the sports,
what happened? Well, I that could have happened because I
would have been sixteen at the time. Yeah, you and
I are in this age wheelhouse. Yeah, we we actually
were alive at this time, and we were we would

(01:59):
have been aware of at least the entity that appeared
instead of the sports scores um. But yeah, something weird
happened at that moment. There was an interruption in normal service. Yeah,
what they call a broadcast intrusion, and U like all
classic broadcast intrusions, it started with a little grainy, you know,

(02:21):
static going on, and they're always a little unsettling when
you watch them, even if they're goofy. Yeah, this is
something kind of creepy about it. You know, it's out
of place. And as soon as something that, especially when
it's something as ritualistic as the news, you know that
follows a very specific pattern, and when something goes outside
that pattern, you know, that upsets our little world balance

(02:41):
for a moment. So in this case, the there was,
like you said, there was this this disturbance in the force,
and a new picture popped up and replaced the sportscaster
and it was a guy in a disturbing rubber mass
uh huh. And that mask was of a specific eighties icon,

(03:04):
which I think a lot of people don't even know
who this is anymore, but Max Headroom. Yeah, if if
you're a child of the eighties, Max Max Hedroom loomed
large for a while. And I know when this intrusion
came out, this broadcast intrusion, it seemed like about half
the people even knew who he was trying to imitate,

(03:26):
and then the other half just had no idea. They
thought it was just some weirdo with the mask. Yeah. Well,
and part of that was because, uh, the quality of
the video was not exactly super high quality. But on
top of that, yeah, it's kind of a niche thing,
and he was Max Hedroom was used as sort of
a spokes thing, I guess, a spokesman for a new coke.

(03:48):
Sure that that great move by the Coca Cola company. Yeah,
oh man, I remember that well, remember it with Paine? Yeah, yeah,
so living living in a land, the whole Coca Cola
New Coke thing was. It definitely strikes close to home.
So yeah, he um. He was a spokesman for that

(04:09):
as well as a kind of a fantasy character who
appeared on lots of other stuff. But generally speaking, if
you don't know who Max Headroom is, first, just go
ahead and do an image search because it'll pop right up.
But it's a a character that was supposed to look
like a digital character, right, It was supposed to like
a computer generated image, and it was kind of a

(04:30):
guy with a long face and weird, kind of ridged hair.
He had always had a dynamic c g I background
behind him that looked like kind of just like Neon
stripes that were constantly twisting and turning in different ways.
And he would stutter, yeah, that digital stutter occasionally and
uh would be very kind of snarky and sarcastic, and

(04:54):
ultimately got a television series as well as you know
two a couple of different televis and series, one of
them which was like a talk show, and one of
which was more of a like an actual fictional story,
like with an arc. Yeah, that one was pretty good. Actually,
the original British show, even though it was a lot
of American actors, was was pretty cool and definitely ahead

(05:15):
of its time as far as you know. The whole
idea was that this uh roving reporter was I think
Matt Frewer played him as a real dude and his
Max Headroom, but he was digitally replaced with this character
Max Headroom, and at the time it just seemed really odd.
But now when you look back at it and watch it,
it's like, man, this show was kind of ahead of this. Yeah,

(05:35):
it was really prescient. Yeah it was. It also revealed
where the name came from. Where Matt Frewer's character, as
I recall, is waylaid and the last thing he sees
before he loses consciousness is a sign on a on
a a wall that's tells what the Max Headroom for.
That wall's pretty clad became the character's name. Uh yeah.

(05:57):
So the person who appeared on this video was wearing
a Max Headroom mask and had this corrugated metal background
sort of emulated the digital look. Wore the suit at
that Max headroom, more like just a dark suit and
tie and um, yeah, this thing was the metal background.
It looked like a like a garage door. It was

(06:17):
just sort of spinning in the background. Yeah, it was.
It was on some sort of gimbal or something. That's
what I figured. Yeah, because you can tell it's swinging
back and forth, so predictably. It can't be held by somebody.
You had to be on some sort of pivot or something,
and but it's moving backward and forward, so it kind
of mimics that that digital line twisting in the background.

(06:39):
And except for one part, there's a part where there's
a clear cut in the video. The video itself was
about or at least what we've seen is about a
minute and twenty two seconds. Yeah. Well, actually, I don't
think we differentiated. There were two videos, two intrusions. The
first one was short and had no audio and was
on w g N. And then about two hours later

(07:00):
or they hijacked the PBS affiliate and that's where the
classic minute and a half, nearly minute and a half
with audio, really strange audio comes through. That's right, because
that first one, like you said, I'm glad you pointed
that out. It was silent. It was the images from
the and the image and the audio from w g
N was cut, but there was no audio coming out

(07:20):
other than that. I think there's like a buzzing noise
that came in through the first intrusion, and you saw
this this figure just sitting there and kind of rocking
back and forth like left and right, which is also disconcerting. Yeah,
it was definitely like you felt like something is really
wrong at that moment. And when it came back, the

(07:40):
sportscaster said, you might be wondering what just happened. I know,
I am, uh something along those lines. But yes, the
second one, you had the audio and it played for
the what we what appeared to be the length of
the video. The first section had uh, the guy just
saying odd things and they were all very Chicago specific. Well,
and and sort of slamming w g N because he

(08:03):
had slammed the Chuck swart Sky Yeah as a freaking liberal. Yeah,
he is a sportscast for w g N. Yeah, and
uh he also talked about the Greatest World Newspaper nerds
something like that, but w g N stands for World's
Greatest Newspaper. Yeah, So it turned out that that little know,

(08:26):
the great, the great World newspaper nerds or whatever however
he worded it, that was a reference back to w
g N. So it's very clearly intended for w g NY.
And the first attack wasn't as effective as as they
had hoped because, uh, like I said, there was no audio.
And also the folks at w g N, once they

(08:47):
figured out something was going on, very quickly changed the
frequency transmitters. They said, well, I guess yeah, yeah, which
is interesting. We'll talk more about how that kind of
helps us know a little more about the attack curs.
Because here's the other thing. To this day, there there's
no the public has no idea who did this. Yeah.

(09:10):
I think that's why this story has lingered, and it's
so cool is because anytime you have an unsolved mystery,
even if it's uh just sort of an odd broadcast
intrusion like this, people are going to be obsessed with it. Like, um,
we've a lot of the information, uh from that I
did research on. Came from a motherboard kind of the
mother of all articles. Had some great research. Yeah, Chris

(09:31):
middle who Yeah, the article, if you want to look
for it, is the mystery of the creepiest television hack,
and I agree this article is fantastic. It really lays
out not just the incident, but also other things that
had happened beforehand that kind of laid the groundwork for this,
as well as just a discussion, although a brief one,

(09:52):
about the hacker culture that existed at that time and
how that kind of lends itself to people who maybe
are cleverer than is good for them, or could be
very nice way to say it, because as it turns out,
the f c C here in the United States does
not take kindly to folks intruding upon established airways. No,

(10:17):
it's it's a big no no, especially with bare butts,
which I think you said. Once the camera cuts, we
didn't continue there. That's when it got really weird because
there's a camera cut and then you see the mask
is off, but the guy has his head out of
frame and it's just sort of holding the mask. Uh.
He has pantser down showing his his bear Fannie, and

(10:37):
then yeah, from profile and then a lady on the
right uh and looks like some sort of Old West
like Antiochley type Garb spanks him with a fly swatter
on his butt. Although spanks is really being generous. She's
very slowly and lightly tapping him on the bottom with
the flyswater, so to the point where you're you're thinking, like,

(10:58):
I guess that's supposed to represent spanking. Uh, doesn't look
like any spanking I ever received as a kid. I
got you. Anyway, That's pretty much where the video cut off,
and then it went right back in the Doctor Who,
and which is really funny to see the transition. Yeah. Yeah,
he died of an electric shock. Yeah, you've got to
watch the whole incident on YouTube if you haven't already. Uh.

(11:19):
And in case you're curious that episode, it's we're talking
classic Doctor Who. Obviously back in seven. This is not
the reboot. Uh, it was the Horror of fang Rock.
So if that's your favorite episode, I'm sorry that was
interrupted back. So yeah, and like we said, the the
audio really showed that that the public television station wasn't

(11:40):
the intended target. It was the it was a target
of opportunity after the first attempt failed. And uh, we'll
talk more about the technology behind that and why they
had to switch from one to the other. Um, it
turns out it was largely a practical issue, at least
as far as I can determine, and um, it was.

(12:02):
There were also references within the Little Weird Diet tribe
the guy made to Coca Cola because he said catch
the wave and he had a new coat can that
he threw down on the ground. Yeah, And also a
reference to the cult cartoon Clutch Cargo. Yeah, he hummed
the theme Clutch Cargo. If you've ever seen the movie
Pulp Fiction, Um, the scene with young Bruce Willis back

(12:29):
in the nineteen seventies, I guess with Christopher Walkin as
his guardian. He's watching Clutch Cargo on TV. There that
with the mouth's cut out. O'Brien has also used that
same comedic great effect using the live action in order
because what what the whole point was was it was
an idea of of reducing the cost of animation big time.

(12:51):
Because there was no animation. You had to picture, yeah,
still picture, and then you would superimpose live actors mouths
on top of it. And if that sounds reap and
disturbing to you, you you're on the right track. It
was not the only cartoon to do this. There were
a few others. Um, thank you, Cambria productions for and

(13:13):
uh yeah, so he hummed like the whole Clutch Cargo
theme and made references to actual episodes of Clutch Cargo.
Uh so it was certainly someone with an odd sense
of humor who did this. Now there was no other message, right,
there was no. It wasn't like a political thing. This
very stream of consciousness kind of weird. He holds up
I guess what we can cleanly describe as a marital aid, yes,

(13:36):
at one point, and throws that on the ground, and um,
it's just once the fly swadding comes in, it's just
obvious that they're kind of free forming. Although it was
not live, which is important to know. This is a
videotape that they made. Yeah, yeah, and it was because
I mean, in order to do a live intrusion would
require essentially a studio and you'd have to have some

(13:57):
sort of linked to a transmitter that all had line
of sight to the same antenna as whatever target you're
you're aiming at. So that would have been an astoundingly complicated.
This is definitely a little easier to pull off. So
you know, now that we know that this, they've they've
never been found, they're likely never to be found. I mean,

(14:20):
it's always possible that someone could come forward and say,
all right, well here's how it actually happened. I'm the
guy who did this. I would improve it. I'm surprised
that hasn't happened by now, because the Statute of Limitations
is up for Yeah, it's way up, so you can't
get in trouble and it's um I think they would
unless they just think it's better left as a mystery
they would live in like especially nowadays with the Internet

(14:41):
like it is, it would blow up, you know, it
would be right. It could possibly be the fact that
I mean, you know, of course we're just projecting here,
but could possibly be that they are no longer terribly
proud of what they did, and or that they've moved
on in their lives. Yeah, there's there's a significant amount
of time since THEAD and they might have thought, you know,
I'm not going to brag about something I did when

(15:03):
I was younger and dumber, especially now that I'm the
CEO of ABC, right, that that might end up. By
the way, we do not actually mean that the CEO
of ABC ORDNY Disney affiliates are involved. But the other
interesting thing is that this was not the first time
that UM I A A an intrusion had happened in

(15:26):
in broadcast history. The first one, if you want to
go back, actually didn't happen in the United States. It
happened back in UH, the UK in nineteen seventies seven,
and that was when a hoaxer interrupted a Southern television
broadcast by UH inserting audio. It didn't change the video.

(15:47):
So this is kind of the opposite of what had
happened the first time with the Max Hedroum incident. But
it was an audio stream that came in and carried
a message from the alien villa on UH. And this
is in the like I said, in the UK. So
obviously the alien had an English accent. I guess that's

(16:07):
only you know, fair like, if you're going to interrupt
someone's program, you want to make sure you're speaking in
the dialect, you know it otherwise, right, Yeah, suddenly they
spoke like like with a French accent. I mean that
would just be adding. But anyway, so it was a
message that essentially said that humans should prepare themselves for

(16:27):
the worst because you know, destruction is a common Yeah,
that's great, that's what a broadcast intrusion should be some
creepy warning, not just a random series of images that
disturb you for things that you can't quite put your
finger on, although that is more disturbing. Almost. Yeah. And
then in six we get the first one in the
United States. Uh, and this was an inside job deal.

(16:48):
This was happened on April at twelve thirty two am,
and it involved the East Coast feed of HBO. And Uh,
what happened was the HBO was showing a movie called
The Falcon and the Snowman Classic. You know, it certainly
could not be helped by approximately four minutes of footage

(17:09):
missing because they've been replaced by a series of colored
bars that say good evening, HBO from Captain Midnight twelve
a month, no way Showtime movie Channel Beware. Yeah, that
had a clear motive. Yeah, And and and actually ironically,
the um the guy was caught. His name was John R. McDougall,

(17:29):
and he was an employee of Central Florida Teleport And
he used what do you use? He the was it
the text that he used? He? Yeah, So the text
generators that the companies used in order to put an
overlay on top of a screen, so like like the
actual words that were being used there. Well, they're very particular.
And by measuring things like the height of the the font,

(17:52):
the how far uh the middle bar of an e
is according to the other side, how close together the
his words are, investigators were able to narrow it down
to a specific machine. Yeah. It's well have had his
fingerprint up there. Yeah. Yeah, this is like incredible forensics, right.
It's sort of like if someone gets hold of a

(18:13):
typewritten sheet of paper and is able to determine the
model of typewriter that was used to actually make this.
But in this case it got even more specific because
these machines aren't everywhere, and that's what led them to
track down McDougall. Who uh, who have just decided that
the recent hike in prices for a monthly subscription to

(18:34):
HBO were unconscionable and he had to make it known. So, yeah,
he had a side job selling satellite dish service. Yeah,
so he thought that would nick his business some and
so he eventually was caught and pled guilty, paid a
five thousand dollar fine, and served just one year of probation.
And it was that incident that led, I believe Congress

(18:57):
to make it a federal violation to it's sudden, yeah,
because they suddenly said, wait now that people can actually
do this. Now great, this was someone, like we said,
an inside job. They had access to a satellite. What
what he actually did was he pointed the satellite of
Central Florida Teleport at the HBO satellite. Chuck, you and

(19:21):
I we wouldn't even know where the heck that satellite is.
So even if we had the equipment and everything else,
we'd just beat Well, the sky is a lot bigger
than I had taken into account. And uh you know,
of course we'd have to be someplace where we could
actually get a good clear view of the sky because
if they're building in the way or something. But uh yeah,

(19:42):
so he he was a good example of that. And
then September, so this is just before them the incident
with the Max Hedgerm incident. Thomas Hainey hijacked a signal
at on the Playboy channel. I think I remember hearing
about this one. Yeah. It was where it was sending
in religious messages essentially saying repent and and you know

(20:04):
you are the discard your wicked ways that kind of thing, right,
And it's no surprise because he actually worked for the
Christian Broadcast Network, so again he had a job. Yeah,
he had access to the equipment necessary and the knowledge
necessary to be able to do this. It's not something
that the average person would be able to do. And
again it was the character generator, the the font generator

(20:27):
that kind of led the way. It was the main
piece of evidence that was leveled against him. Um. I
remember that Pat Robertson was very upset when the verdict
was handled handed down. He said that there wasn't enough
evidence to um to say that Hainey was in fact
the person who who did this. Well, he was convicted,
but um, I think just got probation. And the first guy, McDougald,

(20:49):
is interesting. What he got convicted for was operating without
a license even though he had a license. So that
was a bit of a hinky ruling. I think they
just had to convict him of something because I don't
know if allows in place at that point. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's it's kind of like that deal where
you realize this is someone that we need to punish,
but we don't have a law that covers the crime,

(21:10):
and we haven't defined it as a crime, but we
know that this is something people really shouldn't be able
to do, so we have to somehow justify it. Um. Yeah,
And as it turns out, the every nation, uh, in
some way or another, ends up regulating the electromagnetic spectrum.
But it changes from one place to the other. Sure

(21:30):
there's only so much room, right, yeah, exactly. So electromagetic
spectrum goes all the way from radio waves, which can
a radio wave can be kilometers long, right, and then
you go all the way to the other side to
like gamma rays we're talking about on the nanoscale and
everything in between. That's the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is
part of that. You know, visible light is on the

(21:52):
short side, but radio waves and microwaves are on the
longer side, and uh not all those radio wave so
you know, we can't just all use the same ones
because then we would have interference. Right if if the
television and your phone used the same frequencies, then you
would have interference between the two, and that would be terrible.
Nothing would be usable. Yeah, I don't call it a

(22:14):
crunch if there's too much activity on one frequency, Yeah,
that's that's if you've got everyone just using you know
what they're supposed to. Let's say everyone in the cellular
network has they're all on their phones that we've seen
this happen in life events they're posting len couldn't. Yeah,
or even just going to a big event like any

(22:35):
like c S or any large event like that, you
suddenly can't get access to anything. That's where you've got
more demand for data transmission than there is capacity. Yeah,
I've tried to get a signal at Comic Con before,
and ye, no, no, the same thing is true a
Dragon Con and that's a like a third the size
of Comic Con. But yeah, it's It's also true that

(22:56):
there are wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum that are really
good for carrying data and some that aren't. So the
government has divided up the electromantic spectrum and saying these
are the sections that can be used for specific purposes.
So a large part of it is set aside for
government and military use, a large part of his s

(23:17):
side for radio so AM and FM UH. And then
you also have television broadcast that are that are partial
partitioned off as well cellular data, WiFi. All of these
things have their specific place that is mandated by the government.
So if you go in and start messing around with that,
the government gets pretty upset. Yeah, because I think, you know,

(23:41):
it's sort of a Nippot in the bud situation, like
one broadcast intrusion, really no big deal. And that apparently
is why the lead investigator said that, um, I think
his name was Marcus. He had a hard time getting
resources because there was a little egg on the face
and they've probably just wanted it to go away more
than anything. And no one's really hurt. There was no

(24:02):
damage done, so they're not gonna throw a lot of
money in time trying to find this person. And and
he also had some fairly harsh words for an fcc
UH investigator he was actually in Chicago. He didn't name
the person. Yeah, I said that said that this guy
wasn't willing to go and knock on doors to actually

(24:22):
do some investigation. And part of that is probably because
there was this embarrassment factor. They're also but without the teeth,
you know, with the authority, it makes it hard for
someone to go out and say there's a justification for
spending the time, resources and money necessarily investigating for a
small fine in probation, even if they do catch the person. Now,

(24:43):
the maximum fine, although I doubt that we would see
a maximum fine for something as small as a min
and a half interruption in Doctor Who, Doctor Who fans,
Please don't take me to task for that. But the
maximum fine is a hundred thousand dollars or a year
in jail or both. Yeah, which they were very big
on announcing at the time as well as UM. I

(25:04):
think they had a lot of misinformation they or I
don't know if it's misinformation or they were trying to
get out a little misinformation saying how sophisticated of an
operation it was and how expensive all the equipment must
have been, which is really not in the case now,
I think. I think it was a lot of people
trying to discourage future pranksters from following in there. So

(25:26):
that means, well, let's make sure we we set the
the bar very high, saying it's really hard to do
and it's really expensive. Yeah, and if you do try,
it's gonna get even more expensive for you, because we're
gonna find you a hundred thousand dollars. So, now, the
truth was that the transmission equipment that was that could
be used to do such a thing while brand new

(25:48):
would cost maybe you know, a few thousand dollars, which
is a significant amount of money once it hits the aftermarket.
Like you know, let's say that you've got a station,
a small station that upgrading its equipment and it gets
rid of the old stuff that was on the amateur market.
So you could go out and buy that stuff and
it would be much less expensive than if you were

(26:08):
to buy it brand new. So I mentioned earlier in
this episode about the the hacker culture. Well have you
heard about freakers? Okay, so a freaker spelled pH r
e A K I n G freaking. It's all about
manipulating the phone system. So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac

(26:31):
were freakers, founders of Apple. Actually Wasniac was really the
guy who knew how to do it. But there are
a ton of them. One of the most famous ones
his name was Captain Crunch, and Captain Crunch was called
that because he discovered that by using a Captain Crunch
plastic whistle that came in a box of cereal, he
could mimic the tone that the telephone company was using

(26:53):
and allow him to make free long distance phone calls.
So you had this culture of people who, wait, what's
a long distance phone call? Yeah? Kids, once upon a time,
if you wanted to call anyone outside of your area code,
it cost extra lay. Actually tell me that. The other
day that was cutting my hair. She got a phone call.
She said, I'm sorry, it's my daughter long distance. I

(27:15):
need to step away. And I was sitting there going,
what's long distance? Yeah? Maybe international? Yeah, that might be it.
That's about it. Or you can just keep cutting my hair, right, Yeah, yeah,
you know it's fine. I mean, I'm not gonna know
her half the conversation, but yeah, the the uh. These
were people who thought that these huge systems were fascinating,

(27:35):
but the telephone system was really interesting and learning how
it worked was fascinating. And then once you know how
it works, you know how to kind of game the system. Yeah.
And it's not necessarily the case that they were looking
to cause trouble or to be pranksters, although there was
some mischief involved there too, A lot of it was
more about oh, now I know how this works, and

(27:57):
that means this works this other way. It was really
more about learning the system and then negotiating it kind
of like war, yes, very much like a little mischief,
a little civil disobedience. But I don't think most of
these people early on we're trying to cause harm. No,
it was really more of insatiable curiosity, right, really, I
can so let me just try it out right and

(28:17):
see if it works. I think that's exactly what happened
with this, Max he I totally agree. You had people
who said, let's you know, we know how radio works.
Television broadcast is essentially a radio broadcast. So once you
know how that works, and once you know the basics
behind it, are there ways where we could end up
injecting our own signal into this and have a little

(28:37):
fun and have a little fun exactly. And so it
was one of those things where you had the people
who had to know how, and you have the people
who had the willingness to do it, and they were
working together to create this prank and uh again aiming
at a very specific target, and when that didn't work,
switching to doctor who, Yeah, I appreciate the attitude of
most of this stuff too. To be honest, um, I

(28:58):
don't think there's something wrong with a little high jinks
to thumb your nose at the man if you're not
hurting anybody. Um, I mean, you don't want to see
it all the time because then it takes out all
the teeth out of it. But every now and then,
I kind of like, you know, when they interviewed people
in Chicago, some people on the street were really upset
and some people just kind of laughing. I was like,
I think it's pretty great. Yeah yeah, because again, like
like we were saying, there wasn't any lasting harm here, right,

(29:21):
of course not the actual intrusion didn't cause any damage.
It wasn't it wasn't something that was going to wreck
physical equipment. No, you lost eighty seconds of Doctor Who. Yeah,
which I might say is and some people say it's priceless. Uh,
you know this is Tom Baker, doctor Who we're talking about. Well,
especially back then when you just couldn't go look up,
you know the scene that I missed the night before,

(29:42):
like that was a true intrusion. Yeah, yeah, I mean
this is this is obviously pre well. I mean, the
Internet was around, but nobody was on it except it
was like bullets and boards and stuff that was That
was pretty much what most hackers had access to unless
they were in a university and they had some access
to the preliminary version of the Internet. Um, but there
was no worldwide Web. There was no web. There wouldn't

(30:04):
be another. There wouldn't be a worldwide Web for another
five years. So there was no way of being able
to go on and and check something you missed, Nor
was there a way for you to really easily communicate
with folks all over the world. Now they could do
it with local bolton board systems, And in fact, that's
what we suspect, or at least there there's a lot

(30:24):
of suspicion that, in fact, one of the local Chicago
bbs is had people in a forum who were at
least tangentially involved in this, if not directly responsible, but
to really understand what was going on, it helps to
understand how a broadcast television broadcast actually works. So here

(30:46):
we go. We're gonna going back to the analog days
of TV broadcast technology. So now, Chuck, you've you've been
in a television studio too, right, Yeah? You and you
and Josh I'm sure have done some of this. I've
done some of this. When you see how a TV
studio works, it's actually very eye opening. I mean it
to me, It completely pulled away a lot of misconceptions

(31:10):
that I had had. For example, you think of like cameramen,
but in large part camera operation is done remotely, not
behind a camera. Right. Uh. These cameras that you see
in the studio are enormous and they're heavy. And this
is also the reason why I'm explaining this is also
to to illustrate why doing this live would have been impractical.

(31:37):
These television cameras are the reason why they're so big
and heavy is in part so that they're incredibly smooth
and steady and they aren't going to jitter. If you know,
you could drop something right next to one, it's not
going to move at all. Yeah, it's the same reason
a camera dolly ways you know, a thousand pounds. Yeah. Yeah,
it's in order to get that that stability that you

(31:58):
want so that you don't impounds. By the way, they're
less in that, but they're super heavy for that reason, right,
you want that stability and that smoothness. Uh. And also
television camera doesn't pick up sound, it doesn't have a
microphone on it. It's all about just capturing the image. Yeah,
the mic the sound is captured separately and together the magic. Yeah,

(32:19):
so the photons that's the particles of light that are
coming from a scene and are being captured by a camera.
The light passes through a lens which goes through a prism.
The prism is the purpose of a prism is to
break up light into its component parts. And this case,
we're talking about a prism that breaks light into red, green,

(32:40):
and blue. That's all you needed. And each of those
streams goes and is hit by or it hits a
c c D a charge couple device. Now a charge
couple device. What does is when photons hit it, it it
generates a stream of electricity that essentially reflects the nature
of the photons that hit it. So you've got these

(33:02):
three streams coming out the red, green, and blue. Uh.
They then go into an encoder. Meanwhile, the sound that
you're creating is also going to head back over towards
the master control room. The information from the encoder goes
to the master control room, it gets mixed together. So
you then have a signal that has both video and sound.

(33:23):
Now there. If you were to be able to visualize this, uh,
it would actually be like the the visual data would
make up most of the a range of frequencies like
four within four mega hurts, and then the very edge
of it, like on the far right side, that would

(33:43):
represent the sound. So it's just a little sliver that's
the sound. Yeah, and you're either preparing to broadcast this
out to the masses live or you're just putting it
to tape to do so later. Yeah, these days we
put on a STU or both. Yeah, exactly if you
wanted to to to keep it forever. Now, you may
have heard that there were times where people were broadcasting
stuff and never recording it. So there there are things

(34:06):
that have been created for television that we will never
see again. It's kind of like in some ways going
to see a live stage show. If you were there,
you saw it and weren't that's it. But uh, in
this case, we're talking about a live newscast, So that's
being broadcast out from that point. When it's all been

(34:26):
encoded and you've got this video signal that has all
the information. It's got the red, the green, the blue,
and the audio all four things that you need. Yeah,
it's time to transmit that out and it goes from
the studio to a transmitter. It's called a studio transmitter link. Now,
most studios don't have an enormous antenna that's at a

(34:49):
really high elevation can broadcast to the general area. Cities
share them. Yeah, and we're talking about an era of
over the air television, right. You're using your antenna to
pick up wavelengths. So what what they would do is
they would use the studio transmitter link to beam this
information to a nearby antenna on a very tall building. Yeah.

(35:12):
Usually the tallest buildings in your city will have these,
and Chicago has a lot of tall building, yes, and
they use them for that purpose exactly. So if you
stream that out to the antenna, the antenna then ends
up broadcasting an electro magnetic signal, and that ends up
being picked up by the antenna of your television, which

(35:33):
the electromagnetic signal when it hits the antenna generates an
electrical current. A tuner in your television is able to
focus in on a specific channel and thus kind of
filter the signal from the noise, and then it ends
up pulling out that video stream, creating the red, green, blue,
and the audio, and you get your TV that you
get to watch. It's beautiful. I joked with you earlier

(35:58):
that we should just give them the explanation from Willy Wonka,
which is slightly more simplistic but but easier to explain.
But unfortunately it's not quite that easy. So knowing how
this works, where you've got the signal coming from the
studio being transmitted out to a giant antenna and then
broadcast to an area, there are several areas that could

(36:22):
be potentially vulnerable to intrusion. If you are working on
the inside. Then if you're able to intercept and put
in a new signal to go to the studio transmitter
link to go out, then you're done. That's all you
need to do. You need just very easy to do
and very easy to trace back exactly. Yeah, inside job,
you're like, well, let's look at the people who have access. Now,

(36:45):
that's all that could have done this. But as it
turns out, with a over the air analog transmission, there
was an easier way of doing this where you didn't
have to break into the studio to do it. It
was pretty great. Actually, Yeah, so all you have to do,
and I say all you have to do this still
is pretty significant, is you have to have a transmitter

(37:06):
of your own. You have to be able to have
a direct line of sight to the antenna that's going
to pick up the transmission from the studio, and you
have to transmit on the frequency that the studio uses
at a higher intensity than what the studio is doing.
And then the antenna, which is stupid. Yeah, it can't
differentiate all of noses. That's a bad signal. I don't

(37:28):
want to broadcast. They don't know if it's the right frequency,
it's gonna broadcast it. So when you hit the antenna,
it's gonna go for the strongest signal. I mean, this
makes sense because if you had two signals that were
the same frequency and one is stronger than the other,
chances are the other frequency is coming from a different
source further away, and that's not the one you want

(37:49):
to transmit. Yes, so literally all they needed, I mean,
they didn't need to to blow it out of the water.
They just needed to be stronger. And to do so,
you just need to be a little closer, Yeah, to
be a lot closer in this case. But but yeah, exactly,
they just had to be somewhere along the pathway from
the studio to the antenna that was being used. Uh,
they and they just had to transmit on the right frequency,

(38:11):
which was that was information they could get. They could
get the information on what frequency to use. So you've
got your transmitter, you've got your media, which in this
case was a tape that they had shot earlier that
wasn't lying. You're probably on a building, and they've got
to be somewhere pretty high up. So yeah, likely on
top of a building or at least on like a
balcony or fire escape or something where they can have

(38:32):
a line of sight. Uh, they are, They've got their
transmitter and geared up to the right amount of power,
they shoot it off and everything else is taken care
of for them. They'll try to do anything else. In
this case, the John Hancock building in the Sears Tower
with the two towers that had these two receivers. And
there's been a lot of theories over the years. Um,
most people believe they were probably high up, but I

(38:54):
have seen one theory that they were mobile and a van,
not necessarily high up, just super super close. They Yeah,
that would also require them to have some way of
maintaining that line of sight and that that steady transmission,
because you know, if you if you don't, if you
don't have your electromagnetic waves directed right at the receiver.

(39:18):
Then it's point it's not going to be a strong
enough signal. Yeah, I don't. I don't buy the van theory.
It would be really really challenging, empowering everything. It's be
a pretty more sophisticated. It does make me suddenly think
that the Scooby Gang was responsible for it, because you've
got the big rubber mask like old Nan Withers so
channel nine, which was w g N in Chicago. Uh,

(39:41):
if you look at the channels in the United States,
they actually have the designated frequencies they have to, you know,
use at least the range that's around a hundred eight
seven mega hurts. So you tune your transmitter to that
signal and you aim it at the you know where
the antenna is. You've identified that, You've got it all
lined up, and you're good to go. Well, once w

(40:02):
g N changed their frequency, that meant that it didn't
matter how much power they poured into the transact. It's
like you're speaking the wrong language. So that meant that
suddenly their their prank didn't really go anywhere. They had
a brief appearance with no audio. Yeah, so they probably
did something a little wrong on their end. On their Well,

(40:22):
probably wasn't a test run. They probably wanted it to
work right, right right, but then unfortunately for them, unfortunately
for them, it didn't work with you know, without a hitch.
So they then say, well, what can we do, how
can we um save this and maybe get the actual
video that we shot scene and yeah, if you guys

(40:44):
haven't watched this video, you really kind of need to.
But at any rate, so they then decided to do
their backup plan. They knew the frequency that the local
public broadcast channel was using, and they knew that that
antenna was on top of the Sears tower and that
they could aim at that one. And uh so, whether

(41:05):
or not they had to relocate, they they probably did
just to get a good line of sight on the
on the antenna, but uh it was only a two
hour time difference between the first attack and the second attack,
So to retune the transmitter, to prep it to get
ready to hit the target, and to make sure you

(41:26):
have a line of sight on it, they probably stayed
in the same general area, which is northwest part of Chicago. Northwest. Yeah,
there's actually that that article we were talking about, the
Motherboard article. They have a great picture that shows the
location of both studios of both antenna and it kind
of shows you like an area where where the two

(41:47):
lines almost crossed, and you figure, I bet, I bet
they were somewhere in this general area so that they
could if they didn't have to relocate. Uh, then they
just you know, shifted position, or maybe they relocated by
a couple of blocks, which raises the question how they
get access to a high enough area and still have

(42:08):
power and all that kind of stuff. Right now they
were just on their buddies the roof of his apartment
with an extension quarter. That's probably what happened. Uh. So
they then did the second attack at eleven o'clock or
eleven fourteen, and that one worked much better. Um. And
like we said, the material they had, the equipment they

(42:29):
had was readily available, wasn't It wasn't as rare as
you would think it would be. No. Dr Marcus, the
lead investigator, said that, uh, like a direct TV sized
antenna these days, it's about all you would have needed.
It's not like one of those like school bus size
Satillite used to see in backyards back in the day.
It's pretty incredible, Uh, the how little you would need

(42:52):
in order to do it. So fascinating attack, fascinating fact
that it they were able to do it without being caught. Um.
And the fact that you know, there weren't a whole
lot of broadcast intrusions after this point. You've heard about
maybe one or two. The Disney Channel has infamously been
the attack, the side of an attack on multiple occasions. Yeah.

(43:16):
I think the super Bowl was hijacked briefly few years
ago in one city only though. Yeah. Yeah, Uh, it's
it's harder and harder to do now because you've got
things like digital encoding. Yeah, that make it much much
more difficult for the average hacker to do. I'm surprised
it didn't happen more often back in those days. With
those early I think there's sort of the wild West.

(43:38):
It may very well have been that the scare tactics
the FCC used. We have totally worried, Like people said like, well,
I know I can do this, but I'm totally not
gonna do this. Um. And you know, we we talked
a little bit. Uh. There are some theories out there
about who it could have been responsible for this. My
favorite was the the one that is probably the easiest

(43:59):
to Smiths, which was Eric Fournier, who was a punk
rock musician as well as an avant garde artist who
created a series of videos. Um. It's funny because the
Motherboard article refers to it as a YouTube channel, but
in fact the videos pre date YouTube. Oh yeah, I
guess it is now on a YouTube channel. But they

(44:21):
were called shay U s h A y E St
John Sha st John. And if you look at these,
you you've forced me to earlier. Uh they do have
similar quality, um, very a similar feel almost absurd, surreal, disturbing.
Doesn't necessarily make much sense, you know. I think of
it like you you've seen the horror movies where they

(44:42):
all um center around like a creepy looking doll. Right,
that's a that's a genre unto itself. There's a brand
new one right about a doll Anabelle. Yeah. Yeah, so
that's the fact that I responded so quickly with that
is not good for me. But yeah, it's this idea
of things that look not quite right, and the Saint

(45:05):
John videos are all about that, and they involve the
looping of certain phrases over and over again, experiments and
lighting experiments in uh camera angles as well as digital effects,
or maybe not even digital effects, but special effects. The
earlier ones are actually more trippy the ones that are

(45:27):
on the YouTube channel itself. Um, so you can see
that the there's some shared uh aesthetics. Yeah, and he
lived in Indiana, apparently just a few hours from Chicago. Um,
he passed away in two thousand tens, so we'll never know.
I read one article that said that he admitted to
his friends that it was him, but I couldn't find

(45:49):
anything else to substantiate that. And the Motherboard article goes
so far as to suggest that that it's not him.
It's not him because his friends all said he at
that time, in nineteen seven, he had no knowledge of
video editing. All the video stuff he did was later on.
It was in the late nineties, early two thousand's, so
it would make sense that, um, while it's the same

(46:12):
sort of kind of humor, it's not the same person. Yeah.
His old bandmate even said, you know, Eric didn't do this,
but he would have loved it. Yeah, he would have
thought it was really funny. Yeah. Yeah, and there's another
theory that ice per sal And read it. Yeah, that's
how I saw the link to Motherboard and you sent
me the link and I saw it and read it

(46:33):
as well. Yeah, this one holds some water to me.
Unless this guy Bowie J is that Poe Poagg one
of the two, Unless he is just making all this
stuff up. This otherwise this sounds like a pretty decent lead. Yeah,
I've heard. I've heard some people suggest that that perhaps
the guy himself is the one who did it, and

(46:55):
he's invented these personas to be the way of him
explaining how it was done without actually admitting that he
did it. But he he maintains his innocence. He says, No,
I really, all of the evidence I have is purely circumstantial.
I was thirteen when this happened, which to me suggests
that it's not him. It does not seem like a
thirteen year old. The voice in the video is distorted,

(47:18):
but it does. It definitely seems like it's someone who's
older than that. Um. But he talks about uh, two
brothers and one brother he said. He described him as
seeming to be on the autism spectrum, and that he
had a very keen interest in broadcast spectrum and broadcast technology,

(47:39):
but didn't have very many social skills. Yeah, he was
the Yeah, he was very big as a thirteen year
old on that in that hacker scene, but trying it
sounded like really like one of the young ones trying
to ingratiate himself into the group, into the group. These
were a little older guys who were more experienced. Um.
He calls J and K which are not their names,

(48:02):
to provide their you know, to guard their anonymity. And
he said that Ja, who was supposedly the autistic one,
was m He's the one who says that was the
guy in the mask. They had the same build. He
references his brother in the video. Yeah, he says that
because he shows a glove and he says, uh, this
one is dirty. My brother is wearing the other one. Yeah,

(48:22):
he apparently. He says, this is from his Reddit. He said, Ah,
he liked to tell dirty jokes. The dirty jokes were funny,
at least to me. Is a thirteen year old and
a woman dressed up as Antioakley swatting someone's bare butt
with a fly swatter is a perfect reflection of his
sense of humor. Uh. It was usually childish and sexually deviant.

(48:43):
And he talked about how he had kind of a
verbal tick that instead of saying uh, when he was
trying to think of something, he'd say oh yeah, And
that if you listen to the video, there's some there's
a yeah. There's a lot of him kind of making
oh noises between when he's saying things. So it does
kind of come across as someone who's trying to think

(49:05):
of the next thing to say. Like, it didn't feel
like it certainly does not feel that the Max Headroom
incident was terribly scripted, Like I think it was a
lot off the cup. Yeah. So the the other brother,
Kay was Jay's caretaker uh and also was possibly the

(49:25):
theory seems to be that Kay was the one working
the camera, that Ja was the one on camera, and
that Kay's girlfriend was the one with the fly swatter,
and again all of this ends up being circumstantial evidence.
He said that, as Pogue said, as a thirteen year old,
he went to this apartment that was just filled with equipment.

(49:47):
He says that there was nothing, you know, no normal
decorations except like a rainbow kite or something in there.
Everything else was electronic equipment, and that they were the
people they were talking about something but not explicitly talking about,
just saying that something big was gonna happen and that
he should definitely make sure to be watching channel nine

(50:08):
at nine pm, Uh like w g N at nine
pm so he could see the big thing that was
going to happen, and that he claims he didn't even
put two and two together. Ye like, he saw the
incident go down and knew that something big was going
to happen, which does seem a little hinky to me,
but he says years later as when it all kind
of connected for me, Yeah, it seems a little weird.

(50:29):
That does seem a little weird to me too, but
he said. He does go on to defend himself a
bit and say, you know that there were I heard
a dozen things from them a day that we're just
sort of weird and out there, and it wouldn't register
as anything big to me. With they said, you know,
we're gonna do something big watch the TV tonight. So
in other words, they were a bunch of big talkers,
but not Yeah, this is a kid he's trying to

(50:51):
fit in. He you know, it sounds like he was
kind of nervous hanging around this crowd, eager to please.
Yeah exactly. Yeah, Well, at any rate, he's the one
who on Reddit just laid out the situation and explained
what he thought had happened based upon circumstantial evidence. Again,
he never witnessed any of this himself, according to his account,
and it kind of blew up on Reddit, didn't it?

(51:11):
I did? It did, And he gave specific updates, and
in fact, he was interviewed heavily for the Motherboard article. Yeah,
and he explained that he tried to get in touch
with j and k Um through multiple media, like he
knows where they are still, Yep. He sent them Facebook messages,
he sent an email, and he sent them actual snail

(51:32):
mail right and didn't get any response. And he says,
I'm taking that as a indication that they don't want
to talk about this, and so, out of respect for
their privacy, I'm dropping it. And so he never revealed
the identities of the people. Now, he did have other
people on the Reddit the said they were around that
same scene back then, and it sort of checks out

(51:53):
the guy had a similar ability short of shortened squatty
and um, so he had a little bit of support.
But it's all sort substantial and conjecture. You know, there's
obviously no proof, no smoking gun. Right, So we may
never know for sure who did this. We'll have someone
will have to come forward, that's the only way. Yeah,
but it's one of those mysteries that is really interesting
to read about. To to and the fact that it

(52:16):
it's still you know, you can you can watch the video.
You can actually see what happened. It's kind of cool
because there are a lot of these these weird moments
you just have second or third hand accounts and you
can't you can't really experience it for yourself. You have
to think, oh, what would it have been like? But
now you can actually see. Yeah, it's a pretty neat
little time capsule experience, especially if you grew up in

(52:36):
the eighties. Right, And if you don't know who Max
Headroom is, then maybe you should do some research on
that first and then watch the video to understand how
weird this was. That b B show, I'm telling you
it's pretty good. People should watch that. Yeah, totally. Well, Chuck,
I have to thank you for coming on the show
and for suggesting this. This was a ton of fun too.
I love on stuff you should know doing our more
history centric ones and this this is totally a history

(52:59):
pie podcast. When you think about it for history episode. Yeah, absolutely,
and uh it was It's one of the weirdest ones
that I've covered this and Number Stations those would be
the two big ones. Yeah, man, those are super interesting. Yeah,
very creepy stuff. If by the way, if you guys
do love the creepy go back and listen to the
Number Station episode on Tech Stuff. Go to our RSS

(53:22):
feed and hunt that one up because that one was
a lot of fun to talk about. Uh. And if
you're really into creepy stuff, you know, Stuff you Should
Know has got quite a few episodes that that cover
the creepy too, and you guys do an amazing job
of it. Thanks man. Yeah, it's it's uh a fantastic show.
If you have not listened to Stuff you Should Know,

(53:43):
fix that. Come on, well, thanks for having me and dude,
this has been a it's woody, Allen would say, a
sincere sensation. Pan. I like that. I like that quote. Alright, So, guys,
if you have any suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff,
you just want to get in touch with me and
you want to maybe suggest a topic for me to
talk about the future, or maybe another guest to have

(54:03):
on the show. Send me an email. My address is
tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop
me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler to handle it.
All three is tech Stuff hs W and we'll talk
to you again really soon for more on this and
thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot

(54:24):
com