The Max Headroom Incident: Chicago’s Creepiest TV Hack

May 30

On the night of November 22, 1987, televisions across Chicago hiccupped in a way that still haunts the world.

It was just another lazy Sunday, football played in the background, the evening news flickered, its anchor steady, reciting the day’s tragedies and triumphs. Viewers of WGN-TV were settling into the familiar rhythm of their routine.

And then it happened.
For twenty-two seconds, reality bent a little bit.

The screen crackled, twisted, and was suddenly overtaken by a man in a rubber Max Headroom mask, bobbing and twitching against a backdrop of swaying corrugated metal. His voice was distorted and movements were jittery. Then, as suddenly as it began, he vanished.

Later that same night, it happened again. This time during a Doctor Who rerun on PBS affiliate WTTW. But this time, the intrusion lasted longer…nearly 90 seconds, and got much much stranger.

No hacker has ever claimed responsibility, and no suspect was ever caught. Nearly four decades later, the Max Headroom signal hijacking remains one of the most chilling and unsolved digital pranks in American broadcast history.

But was it really just a prank?
Or was it a manifesto wrapped in madness…a low-tech oracle from someone warning us that the machines we built might someday turn against us?

Let’s back up for a moment before I spiral too far into the obscurity (stick around if you’re here for it).

Who Was Max Headroom?

To understand the hijacking, you have to understand the mask.

Max Headroom wasn’t just any fictional character, he was the face of techno-futurism in the ‘80s. A glitchy, computer-generated AI TV host with a stutter and a smirk. A corporate creation masquerading as rebellion.
He debuted in the UK in 1985, then crossed the Atlantic to star in Coca-Cola ads and his own short-lived American TV show.

He was meant to be satire, but also was sort of a mirror.

Max mocked media excess, consumer culture, and the encroaching presence of machines in our everyday lives. And his very existence felt uncanny and weird. He wasn’t really AI (it didn’t exist like that back then): he was an actor, Matt Frewer, caked in latex and filmed with choppy editing to simulate the illusion of a digital personality.

By 1987, Max Headroom was both a punchline and a prophecy.
Which made the pirate’s choice to wear his face somewhat unsettling.

Broadcast Terror: What Happened That Night?

The first intrusion hit WGN-TV at 9:14 p.m., right in the middle of the sports segment. The screen turned black, then came a dusting of dramatic static, and then…there he was.

Max.

Not the real Max of course, but someone in his likeness. The background was a crude, oscillating sheet of metal, maybe a piece of cardboard made to resemble the infamous Max Headroom effect? The figure in the mask twitched, jerked, and muttered nonsense, and the audio was garbled, you couldn’t clearly make out what he was saying. The entire scene lasted 22 seconds before WGN engineers managed to switch the transmission feed to a backup line.

They assumed it was a fluke, or a one-off.
They were wrong.

At 11:15 p.m., the pirate returned, this time on WTTW, hijacking Doctor Who mid-episode. But this time, the engineers weren’t fast enough, and the full performance played out.

And it was really weird.

The masked man referenced WGN sportscaster Chuck Swirsky, he sang snippets of songs, he moaned, and he screamed. He waved a sex toy at the camera, flashed his ass at the camera and had it spanked with a flyswatter by an off-screen accomplice.

And then, mercifully, he disappeared.
Doctor Who returned.
But the viewers never quite did, as some were very disturbed.

The Glitch That Shouldn’t Have Been Possible

Broadcast signal intrusions aren’t easy to pull off. Not then, and definitely not now.

This wasn’t some kid hacking a modem in his bedroom, to interrupt a live television signal in 1987, the hijacker would have needed a powerful microwave transmitter and a clear line of sight to the station’s broadcast tower…either on top of the John Hancock building for WGN or the Sears Tower for WTTW.

The level of technical knowledge required was high, the equipment needed wasn’t easily available, and the fact that two separate stations were breached on the same night, with such bizarre precision, suggests really careful planning had to happen.

It wasn’t just weird.
It was incredibly skilled.
Which made it all the more terrifying, and dare I say, ironic.

A Dead End Wrapped in Tin Foil

The FCC got involved, of course. So did the FBI.

Engineers scoured logs, law enforcement combed through leads. WTTW even offered a reward for anyone with information, but no one ever came forward, no one slipped up, and no one was ever caught.

Some theories say it was a group of students from a nearby university, Northwestern or UIC, maybe. Others believe it was a disgruntled broadcast technician. A few speculate that it was a failed attempt at performance art. And the internet, decades later, added new layers to the mystery: maybe it was a warning, or it was anti-corporate commentary, or it was the first digital haunting.

The signal never returned, but its echoes never faded.

The Message Beneath the Madness

At first glance, the hijacking feels like pure chaos. Almost like a fever dream of pop culture fragments, mixed metaphors, and perverse humor.

But look again.
Everything the Max Headroom pirate did was media: mimicry, parody. From Coca-Cola slogans to local sports anchors, he chewed up the media landscape and spit it back out, warped and wild.

He wasn’t just mocking Max Headroom.
He was becoming him in some weird way.
No to mention the technical proficiency needed to pull this off was high.

This wasn’t just a prank, it was an exorcism of television itself. Some sort of punk act of rebellion in an age before YouTube or livestreams, and a moment where the screen lost control and the viewer wasn’t safe from what they saw.

And maybe that’s why it lingers so hauntingly in my mind, running around rent free.

Because in that moment, something we thought was stable (our TVs, our routines, our sense of normal) was hijacked. Not by terrorists, and not by the corporations who normally hijack our lives, but by a ghost in the machine.

In the many years since then, we’ve seen bigger hacks, much deeper leaks, and absurd cyber warfare.
Data breaches that alter elections and destroy reputations have long been at play in this wild world of technology now.

But few have felt as personal and bizarre.

The Max Headroom hijacking wasn’t about money or even about power.
It was about a strange presence.
An unwanted visitor stepped into your living room, used your screen, spoke in tongues…and then disappeared into the static, and never came back.

Echoes in the Internet Age

Today, it would be both harder and easier to do what he did.

Easier, because streaming platforms have fewer gatekeepers, and anyone can go viral, anyone can broadcast live.
But harder as well, because now everything is traced: every IP logged, every frame fingerprinted, the digital wild west has its own bounty hunters now. I even know one or two of them.

And yet…the mystery lives on.

People still make documentaries about the hijacking. Reddit threads spiral with speculation, while YouTubers hunt the location of the shoot, frame by frame. Someone, somewhere, might know the answers, but they’ve never spoken up.
Maybe the point was always to disappear and never claim the act.

The Pirate’s Legacy

So what did the Max Headroom hijacker actually leave behind?

Not demands, no cause to be found, and no identity.

Just a weird interruption of tv, and a few minutes of pure chaos that no one has ever explained.

And maybe that’s why it still sticks, because it wasn’t polished or planned.
It was raw, messy, and strangely relatable. Someone, somewhere, broke through the screen for a moment, then vanished without a trace.