Thinking Sideways: Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion

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(00:23):
Thinking Sideways, I don't just stories of things we simply
don't know the answer to. Welcome again to another episode
of Thinking Sideways. As always, I am Steve, and of

(00:45):
course I'm joined by Devin and Joe, and once again,
believe it or not, I know it's hard to believe.
We've got a strange case. Believe it or not, I
know it's hard to believe, believe, believe a huge mystery.
Today episode is brought to you by I Believe. Well,
what we're going to talk about is today is the

(01:08):
Max Headroom broadcast interruption. Everybody remembers the eighties, right, not really? Well? Yeah?
Maybe not? Yeah? Well you know, if if you don't,
you're missing out on a lot of iconic TV shows
and characters, specifically the character named Max Headroom. Yeah, I

(01:30):
actually liked that show a lot. I did too, I
did too, Max headroum. He was the first quote unquote
digital character on TV and uh though really there wasn't
anything digital about him. Now he was Matt Matt Frewer, Yes,
who's been in a ton of stuff through the through

(01:51):
the years and since then. It's you know, it's actually funny,
is every time I see Frewer in a TV show,
I expect him a little bit somewhere in the back
of my head to do that weird Max Headroom stutter.
Why well, why didn't he do it? That's not his voice?
What's going on? You know? You guys asked that every
time you meet somebody in public like fan probably I'm sure, Well,

(02:16):
but you know what, this isn't an episode about eighties
TV or my favorite eighties TV shows, which there are
a lot of them. Uh so, it's because it's my
childhood was. Actually, if you're not don't enough to remember
what TV was like back in the seventies and the
eighties and stuff, it's like TV it's a lot better today.
You young whiper snappers should really appreciate what you've got.

(02:38):
It sucks, Yeah, that's what I hear. Yeah, Oh well,
what we're gonna talk about is we're going to talk
about the Max Headroom character being used or the face
of the character being used, and what is sometimes referred
to as the best hack of all time of broadcast television.

(03:00):
Technically it's not really a hack so much as an
intrusion whatever. Tomato tomato depends on your perspective. I guess now,
before we get too far into this, I do want
to thank our listener. Yah see. I believe it's how
you pronounce the name. I'm not exactly positive, so if
I angled that. Sorry. Hey, by the way, if you're

(03:20):
if you're a listener and you want to send us
at a suggestion and you have a strange or sort
of unusual name, maybe tell us how to pronounce it. Yeah,
if it's a hard to pronounced name, a normal Joe
Ben Bob Devon named the normal white person name. Yeah, yeah,
because we're dumb, Yeah, that would be helpful. But um,

(03:41):
we got this request first through One Avenue and then
next thing, you know, a bunch of requests for it
came through Souper Popularity. It was a super popular one.
I think we got two or three on Twitter alone.
So we had to do it. I knew I had
to take it, so I stole it out from underneath.
Devon was planning on it, and we're going to run
with it from here. So if this is a terrible episode,

(04:03):
you can blame me and just think funnily. But it
would be like if had done it. Yeah, it's terrible episodes.
You can blame the eighties. Al Right, Well, let's get
into the story. On November twenty second seven. Sorry, yeah,

(04:26):
why are you laughing? I was five months old. I
remember this. This was awesome. Yeah, a TV in your
nurse ory and you could watch this. No, I don't
think I was watching TV at nine pm. You didn't
have a flat screen TV right there in your crib.
I don't you know. I don't remember a lot from
that time period, but I definitely don't remember flat screen TVs.

(04:49):
It was kind of a primitive time, wasn't Yeah. They
all had dials on them still, right. You know people
wrote things in chalk on walls instead of with markers.
You know, it was such a primitive time. His remote
was one of those clicker remotes. You ever seen those?
All the actual clicker, Yeah, the the noise actually to

(05:09):
change the channel. Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry, we're getting to
rub it in Okay, let's let's start this over. Okay, Sorry,
I don't laugh this time. Okay. On November twenty seven,
during the nine o'clock News is Sports Report on Channel nine,
which the call sign is w g n TV. Yeah,

(05:31):
w G in America, everybody knows because that's the channel
that plays America's funniest from videos. That pretty much all
they play. These is all they play. By the way,
this is in Chicago. The news viewers were watching as
the anchor at the time, his name was Dan Rone,
was cut off literally in mid sentence, and he was

(05:52):
replaced with a black screen so that the screen just
went black. It had some funny little numbers on the bottom,
and that sat there for about ten seconds, and suddenly
the screen was filled with what looks like a piece
of corrugated metal rotating back and forth. And if you've
never seen Max Headroom, take a moment, pause this episode

(06:16):
and pull up anything from the Max Headroom Show. And
he's always got these weird streaming lines and rotating stuff
in the background, and that's what this is reflective of.
That actually was like corrugated tin. It was it looks yeah,
it looks like corrugated roofing. Is exactly what it looks like,

(06:36):
but it's rotating back and forth, and there's a person
wearing a Max Headroom mask standing in front of it, uh,
kind of bobbing up and down and back and forth
for about ten seconds, and then suddenly the screen goes
black again and it returns to Dan Rone staring into

(06:57):
the camera. So this whole thing is lasted not a
very long time. Uh, there was absolutely no audio. There
was a weird well, there was no verbal audio. There's
a weird tone. I couldn't I could never figure anything
out from it. Nobody else seems to have really cared
what it was, so I'm guessing it was just interference

(07:17):
of some kind. But that's all there was. And to
his credit, dan Rone did a fantastic job and had
a sense of humor because he looks into the camera
and I kid you not, says, well, if you're wondering,
what's just happened? So am I said something like, thanks

(07:37):
Max for that great report. Now, well you know it's
It's funny is that Rome did obviously have a sense
of humor about this, because the next week he pretended
to get interrupted again by the Max Hidroom. But that
was totally stage. So he was obviously willing to have
a little bit of fun with it. But if if

(07:58):
that had been all that happened, and if that was
all that occurred, nobody really would have cared and this
story would have just disappeared. They would have just gone
off and be no more. But best Max Headman went
too far. Max Headroom continued interrupted. He interrupted an episode
of Doctor Who. He did and Doctor Who that's rioted

(08:22):
nearly burned the s into the ground. That was not
what Doctor Who fans. Yeah, now what happens is we
now move over to Channel eleven, which is stationed w
t t W. As Joe said, they were airing a
episode of Doctor Who and it was specifically it was

(08:45):
the Horror of fan Rock episode season four, season four,
which for doctor good Ta Yeah, our Doctor Who nerd
fans toms my absolute favorite old doctor. Yeah, he's one
of the best. Yeah. No, he has the best old
doctor for sure. Yeah, and I somebody email me about this.
We'll talk about it. Well, do we want to talk

(09:07):
about his scarf or should we just leave that because
we'll talk like ten minutes about Dore fromode on the
Doctor Who's scarf At some point we really should Okay.
At eleven fifteen, again, this is right in the middle

(09:27):
of dialogue of this episode of Doctor Who, the screen
gets kind of staticky, and if you've ever watched old television,
when the vertical and the horizontal is kind of off,
it kind of twisted and bended from vertical to horizontal
a little bit, and then all of a sudden flips
and suddenly presumably the same person wearing the Max headro

(09:53):
mask standing in front of a piece of cord get metal.
From here on out, I'm just gonna refer to this
person it is Max because it's simpler because we really
don't know who that person is, and that's one of
the key things in this mystery. From here for it,
we're going to talk about Max. Unlike the first interruption,
there was audio that came through, and it did have

(10:17):
it was spoken audio. It was a little distorted. It
was distorted. It's actually one of the like creepier things
for me, Like this is another one of those mysteries
that you hear about and you watch the video late
at night because you're dumb, and on some of some
Reddit thread that's said, what's the creepiest unexplained broadcast and

(10:39):
you're you know, laying in bed thinking, oh, they can't
be that creepy, and they aren't that creepy. But for
whatever reason, there's like one little thing about it, and
it's for me, it was the pitch of this like audio. Yeah,
this audio is very high pitch. It's and it's it's
really difficult to understand. And that's think about it is

(11:00):
too as the guy is just his antics and his
talking and everything, it's just like a little off his rocker.
It's like it reminds me of a more frenetic version
of The Joker when he busted it on television in
Gotham City. Yeah, yeah, it's it's wild. There's hand flailing,
and we're going to get into some of this. But

(11:21):
I do want to just give a big thank you
to whoever took the time to try and clean up
that audio and then transcribe it, because if I had
to try and do that, it just wouldn't have happened.
I'd given up on like the second play because it
is it's kind of tough to hear. And that's one
of the reasons that we're not actually going to to

(11:43):
put that audio into this episode, is that it is
very difficult to understand, and it's not pleasant to listen to. First.
It's a minute a half long. Frankly, it doesn't make
a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah, it's easy
to find watch the video. You can watch the video
if you want. But let's let me just walk through

(12:03):
and kind of describe what happens. So again we've got
Max in front of the same rotating background, which it's
very brightly lit, it's reflective, it's hard to look at
talking into the camera. After a couple of lines, Max
bends over, picks up a Pepsi can and says the

(12:24):
line catch the wave, which, if you don't remember, if
you're not from that era, is from a coke ad
that was running at the top, not just new coke.
You're right. Max flails around a pepsi can, which is
kind of weird because it's coke pepsi can, but anyway,

(12:45):
flings it forward, it hits the ground, bends over, grabs it,
tosses it away again. Uh flips the bird at the
camera wearing a rubber finger. And this is one of
those weird interpretation spots in US story. I've heard that
it isn't a rubber finger, but instead is a rubber fallus.

(13:08):
It's probably the nicest way to say it. I don't
know for sure, I have I honestly, it looks like
a rubber finger to me, but people say it's something.
That video is pretty blurrious. It's uh, it's continuing on
from there. Um, Max says a few more lines, starts

(13:30):
to then hum the tune to a TV show from
the nineties sixties, which was a cartoon called Clutch Cargo.
And this whole time, it's this funny voice that Max
is talking. In the background is again still moving back
and forth. Suddenly Max bends over and picks up a

(13:51):
glove and puts it on, or tries to put it
on before throwing it away, continues to gyrate around a
little more, and then suddenly the scene cuts and the
scene cuts to the rubber mask being held up off
of the left side of the screen, with the rubber

(14:12):
finger or fallus, whichever it is, sticking out of the mouth,
and there's some dude with his bare butts sticking out
of his pants holding the mask next to it, continuing
to talk in that weird voice, and there's a woman
on the right side of the frame. Somebody dresses because

(14:36):
it's it's really you just see kind of you know,
mid torso to maybe thugb top of the thigh. That's it.
And this person has a fly swatter and begins to
smack presumably the same person which would do Max on
the bottom as Max continues to talk, and then it

(14:57):
goes black and it cuts right back into the episode
of Doctor Who that was playing. And this is my
favorite part. It just happened to the cut in as
the doctor looks at the camera and says, as far
as I can tell, a massive electric shock, you must
have died instantly. God, I love that. It's perfect. Yeah,

(15:21):
So it looks to me like there are only two
people involved in making the video because you know after
the cut that the background is stopped rotating, which means
the person that was rotating that the first half had
to stop doing that. We'll we'll get into that. We'll
get into that when we're talking into theories, because you're
a little bit ahead on there. But that's no, that's
a good observation because we want to talk about what

(15:42):
he said, right, because what he said it's weird. He's weird.
It is so it is so strange. So this isn't
an exact transcript. Some of this stuff I pulled out.
Some of it I capped, But I'm just gonna kind
of run through what we have that we know that

(16:02):
people have figured out that Max said during this second
broadcast interruption, the one that was a minute seconds or
so long during dr who it says he's a freaking nerd.
I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky freaking liberal, which
according to the research, is referring to a sportscast announcer

(16:23):
for w g N Radio at the time. Then we
again catch the way which is the new Coke slogan
we talked about. Your love is fading is shouted right
before he throws the finger slash fallus onto the floor. Uh,
let's see, I still see the X. This is a

(16:45):
reference to remember I said that Max was humming a
tune from that TV show Clutch Cargo. That is evidently
the title of the last episode of Clutch Cargo from
the nineteen sixties. Yeah, that's a really, really far back reference.
Let's see, I just made a giant masterpiece for all

(17:06):
the world's greatest newspaper nerds. Again, this is evidently another
Chicago centric dig and it's at Chicago's TV stations. The
call sign, which we talked about earlier, w g N.
It's an abbreviation for World's Greatest Newspaper, which the Tribune

(17:28):
who the Chicago Tribune who owned w g N. That
was what they used to call themselves in the early days,
and that's how w g M came about. So again
we're there's a lot of weird little riffs. Uh. I
said that Max picked up a glove and he says,
my brother is wearing the other one. It's dirty. It's

(17:48):
like you got bloodstains on it, which I don't even get.
That's why I said, is like the ramblings of an
adult mind. It kind of is. We're almost done though. Um.
When the mask and the exposed bottom are shown on
the screen, we hear Max say they're coming to get me,

(18:08):
Come get me, bitch, at which point the fly swater
begins to go into action and indicative of the Max
Headroom character, there's a lot of stuttering of words. But
it's weird because instead of so much Max Headroom used
to do a lot of stutters, as if you would
have a digital audio file or a record that was skipping.

(18:31):
That's kind of the way it was made to sound
like his like his audio file was scrambled, and this
person sounds like they're trying to mimic that. But really
what it turns out into is more of moans and
drawn out words, and there's some screaming and gyrations, and
there's a there's like a it's like a break and

(18:53):
it's like the bridge of the whole artistic piece where
he just like screams and moans and like laughs for
like five seconds or something, and that that, honestly is
the creepiest part for me, when he's doing that. The
first time I watched it, I didn't totally understand the
heads I was not in the unsolved mystery like world yet,

(19:17):
so I obviously not a child of the eighties times,
so I wasn't in the headspace of the weird, crazy
people of the world, and I just kept thinking, that
person is in so much pain, what's going on? Why
are they still hurt? Well, no, it's before that, it's
when he's still in the chair, So I you know,
that's the creepiest part for me, is just the scream

(19:39):
moans that happened every once in a while. Yeah, it's weird.
If you google Max Headroom broadcast interruption, you will find this.
Watch it, watch the video the video, and I'll give
everybody a hint. If you find a video that is
thirty seconds or so, that is the initial interruption that
basically has no too except for Dan Rone talking. If

(20:03):
you see anything that's a minute and a half plus,
that's going to be the second interruption. If you can
find one that has subtitles, i'd recommend that because that
really helps you understand what's going on. Maybe we can
find one and posted on the website. Yeah, we've I've
got I've got one bookmark that's got the well have
to put that up. But if people want to just
track it down, I would recommend looking for one that's

(20:25):
got the subtitles. Yeah, because you really can't understand what
he's saying. It's it's very difficult. I know. We watched
it one more time when we started tonight and I
started understanding it. But it must have been the dozen
time that I had watched that thing, so we finally
started making watch it again. If you've seen it before
but not recently watched it again, I always forget about

(20:47):
that second half. I don't know why. I just always
do the fwater. Yeah, I always forget about that. Your
probably that probably Yeah, it's probably a good thing. Yeah,
remember the good thing? Five month old months you were
already watching Doctor? Are you kidding? Of course I was.
As I said before, this whole thing. The second interruption

(21:10):
lasted about a minute and a half. That was twenty
over years ago, and to this day, we don't know
positively who did it, who pulled it off, the the
authorities tried to figure it out, they didn't ever get

(21:31):
to the bottom of it. And the theories are kind
of sparse. There's not a whole lot of theories really,
I've only got three so far. But before we get
into the theories, I want to help everybody kind of
understand how this could have been done, because hacking TV

(21:53):
today is very, very difficult because it's a digital signal.
If you don't know how digital signal works, don't try
because it's really really complex, and your chances of getting
in there are somewhere between slim and none. Now you're
better off actually just invading the TV station and tying
up everybody at gunpoint and then just put your stuff on.

(22:15):
That's the easier than actually trying to hack the signal.
I wouldn't do that. Recommend not recommending that. I'm just
saying we're not even like mildly suggestive word like saying,
don't do that. This is in a simplified version, as
with most very very simplified the science of thinking. I

(22:38):
will start with the fact that, without a doubt, what
was done, according to the government, was against the law
broadcast interruption. According to this name is terrible. Eighteen US
Code one three six seven, which was enacted in six

(22:59):
had put an addition in that said that satellite jamming
was a crime. Technically this is satellite jamming. So this
was definitely a crime according to the government, but they
could never track down who did it. The FCC had
looked into it and they're kind of it seems like
the ones who deal with this, but that's why it
was a crime. But this is how you do it.

(23:22):
So we're just gonna go ahead and say disclaimer. We're
saying it's a crime. It's still a crime. We're gonna
tell you how to do it, but we're not saying
do it. You can't do it anymore. That's the thing.
Everybody uses a digital signal that is saying, and this
is how somebody would hack an analog television signal. So

(23:43):
if you had you know, you had the big metal
antenna on top of your house, and that's how you
got TV forever until about five years ago. Okay, well
that's it was an analog signal and they stopped analog.
So you can't do this method anymore. So disclaimer, but
don't try it anyway. Can't do it. You can't do
which actually we're gonna like slip disinformation and we're gonna

(24:03):
be kind of vague about the whole thing. Oh no,
science is terrible and inaccurate and half of it's made up. Okay,
To spread their signals across the city, what a local
TV network would do is they would first relay their
signal from the studio to a high powered transmitter that

(24:28):
was on top of a tall building or a skyscraper.
And that connection between those two places, between the TV
station and the transmitter is actually where the weak spot
is at. So that's the weak link in the process,
which is what somebody who was going to do a
broadcast interruption would That's what they would capitalize on. That's

(24:51):
where they would strike to interrupt the signal. It was
really really simple. All you had to do was you
had to have transmission equipment of your own, and you
had to be vertically at a high enough location. And
people say that this would be on the roof of

(25:12):
a building or some kind of high rise or something
like that in between the studio and the transmitter. Were
they not typically on top of the studio, like, was
that not? No, they were, They were not always in
the same location. So the studio is in one place,
but the transmitter was on top of a big tall

(25:33):
building with lots of strong equipment to spread it around.
So that's so. Yes, it is too different places, so
you get in between the two. And according to the research,
people think that in this particular instance, that means that
it was somewhere between north or the northwest sides of Chicago,

(25:56):
and from there all you had to do was id
nify the skyscraper that had the transmitter on it and
blasted with a high powered microwave signal of your own.
And it doesn't even need to be that high power.
It just needs to be a little more high powered.
That just needs to be strong enough in the studio
signal a little stronger than that and you and you're golden,

(26:18):
and they were so far away. I'm sorry. So okay,
not only were they like not right next to each other,
but they were so far away that you could say, oh,
it was like the north northwest side of Chicago. Are
you talking about the two different transmitters that were hacked. Yeah,
well I think that. So there there's a great map
out there, and I looked at it, and I want
to say that they were only like a quarter to

(26:41):
a half a mile apart. It wasn't a huge distance. Okay,
that's fair. I mean, I mean it's big when that's
like the only thing that's keeping you from being hacked.
But hacking wasn't that big of a thing. So that's
that's one thing to keep it in mind. At different times,
very different time Um. So, as Joe said, you didn't

(27:02):
have to have a hugely strong signal. You just had
to be strong enough to override what was coming from
the studio. And people could do this relatively inexpensively on
their own. And the brand new equipment for TV stations
costs tens of at the time was tens of thousands
of dollars. But you could get older equipment second hand

(27:27):
at an affordable price for a ham radio guy or
somebody who's into that an enthusiast. It wasn't a huge cost,
and you didn't need a massive satellite dish, you know
direct TV, those silly little dishes that people put on
their houses. That's all the big of a dish you
would have needed to use to broadcast at that transmitter

(27:48):
to to bust in. Okay, the first signal interruption that
we talked about, which was at w g N and
the Sports news section, that that only lasted that ten
actual ten twenty second time frame because as soon as
Dan Rone got interrupted in the screen went black and

(28:10):
then Max came on. One of their engineers was pretty
quick on his feet and he changed their frequency so
that they were transmitting in a different frequency. The transmitter
knew suddenly it should be getting this other frequency, so
it ignored the interrupted signals. So that's why one was

(28:31):
so very short for w t p W channel eleven. Uh,
somebody was asleep at the switch. Somebody sleep at the
switch not so fast, So that's why that one went
on so long. But as I was saying earlier to you, Devn,
this this wasn't the first broadcast interruption. If we look

(28:51):
at ACTAE, just a lot of them. Oh yeah, well,
I only want to call out a couple of them
that I found fun or kind of humor. We've got.
April twenty second six, a guy by the name of
John McDougald jammed HBO signaled if you're from that era,
you will remember the color bar screen that meant that

(29:15):
something was wrong or the station was off the air.
And what he did is he presented that color bar
with lines of text on top of it, and the
text read good evening HBO from Captain Midnight, twelve dollars
a month, no way showtime movie channel Beware and that's

(29:36):
out there for minutes. Yeah, though he didn't use a
radio jam reminder standing as he was working at a
satellite uplink location and he just switched the satellite. He
just basically rotated a dish over to point he worked
with satellites. He also got he got busted, obviously fine,
and he got like a year or so is probation.
It's amazing how they figure out who did it, because

(29:58):
he used some usual text encoder to make the text
that was on the screen. That's how they figured it out.
And that's how they busted this guy. Yeah, and then
there was another guy who got busted just because he
was shooting his mouth off and he would have got
away with it. I can't remember which guy that was.
That one I don't know, but the one, the other
one I want to talk about, which I find a

(30:20):
little humorous based on what it is and who got it,
is September, a gentleman by the name of Thomas Haney.
I believe it's how you pronounced it. He interrupted Playboy
TV signal with text messages telling viewers to repent and

(30:40):
find Jesus. It's funny, you know. The one that comes
to mind for me is the one where, uh, gosh,
it was some fairy young children's show this Yeah, and
I think you know it's the exact opposite of you
were just telling about. Yeah, mine's funny, yours is just yeah, thanks,

(31:01):
thanks for that. I just remember because I was in
preschool at the time. You're watching the show when it happened. Yeah,
you know it wasn't local liar to Okay, let's move on. Normally,
this would be the point where in this episode, since

(31:22):
it is sponsored by Audible, I would tell you about
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(31:45):
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(32:07):
I don't know if either of you two ever read
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sci fick fiction. It's it's fun, it's light reading. And
I knew that's what I was gonna want for hours
and hours on a plane, and so I got Ocean
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(32:27):
So if you're in the game and you haven't read
that one, I get it, especially since it's narrated by him,
which is pretty cool. He's got a great voice and
it's funny. As I was listening to it, I really
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(32:48):
the Harry Potter movies, because man, yeah, his voice just
kind of a time sounds like that. So it was
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book that I am a Scott was Chariots of the
Gods by a guy named Eric. Yeah, that one about
aliens coming to Earth. I remember I read that when

(33:10):
I was a kid, and it looked really interesting. But
it seemed too heavy for a plane ride. Oh no,
it's not that heavy. Well, it was much longer than
the Neil Gaming book, so I went with the Neil
Gaming Book, but it seemed easier to pay attention to
on an airplane. But if you guys want to download
a Neil Gaman book or Chariots of the Gods or

(33:32):
whatever you can, you can get your thirty day free
trial and your first book free from Audible by going
to audible podcast dot com slash thinking sideways. I mean it,
it really helped me with the plane ride. I probably
spent an hour perusing their library before actually downloaded something,
because it's a hundred or a hundred fifty thousand titles

(33:54):
and growing the app. I actually put the app on
my tablet, which I gotta admit most player apps drive
me nuts. And what I really liked about this one
is that when my Divide, when the tablet was asleep
and I woke it up, the player was on the
wake screen, so I could quickly and easily posit or
or rewind it a little bit, which so many people

(34:17):
dropped the ball on that, so I was really happy
that that was there. But yeah, it was. It's a
really good sight. So I like the player a lot.
But if you guys want to start that trial again,
it's Audible podcast, dot Com, slash Thinking Sideways, start your
free trial, and really, you know, it's Ours of Enjoyments. Yeah,
so guess that doesn't really tie right back into the

(34:40):
theory section. I don't know is your next theory? It's aliens. No,
don't crid what is your next theory? The first theory
that I have is specific to one person, which doesn't
tie you into Aliens or Neil Gaiman or anybody. No,

(35:02):
unless it Neil Gaiman. Was it Nail Neil Gaiman? No,
I don't know, yes, it was Neil Gaiman. The first
theory is that it was Neil Gaiman. Okay Stopporn. Our
first theory is that it's a guy by the name
of Eric Fournier. People think that Eric Fournier is responsible

(35:24):
for the whole thing, and the reason is for near
just some weird stuff. He's got a YouTube channel. He
makes really strange videos. He as an adult, dresses up
in odd costumes and wears a doll's mask. He's, by

(35:45):
the way, cut the bottom of the mask off and
duct taped it together so that when he talks, the
mouth moves uh. And he talks to the camera as
a character called shay st John. He moves around radically.
There's weird, high pitched voices, and he flails around that

(36:06):
The gesture style is similar to what is in the
Matt's Headroom video. It's weird. I watched a couple of
four years videos, these shayse St John videos, and there
I got admit a little disturbing, and I didn't get
them at all because the costume is always in kind
of various states of disrepair and wigs that are ratty.

(36:32):
It's just odd. So the story, though, is that in
the eighties. In the mid eighties, four years a young
man I think he was in his late teens at
this point, was in a band and he wanted to
get exposure for the band. Oh you know, it's a
great way to do that is not mentioning your band
at all. Yeah, well what he did, no, no, this

(36:55):
is years ago, not not the new videos that he's
doing now. This was for the band and then um
but he uh, his original intention was to make a
video promoting the band, and then he was going to
interrupt the signal and he was gonna put it in
there some people there in Chicago learned about his band,
and then at the last minute realized what a dumb

(37:16):
idea of that was because it was gonna come back
on him super fast. So at the last minute changed
it up and made the Max Headroom video. Problem is,
for near was in his teens at the time, and
according to his friends, he a wasn't in Chicago to
be able to pull this off, and me didn't have

(37:41):
the technical know how to make it happen. So it's
a weak link. I think really it's because people watch
these kookie videos and this these weird erratic gestures and
movements and presume that that must be the same person.
I honestly think the part of the videos at four

(38:01):
Near does. They're sped up at times, so it looks
like a person just normally leaning forward leaning back looks
like a very abrupt, jerky motion because the track has
been messed with. So I think that's why people think
that it's four near. But I don't buy it. I

(38:23):
agree with you. Okay, Sorry, I was just sitting here
googling because I know you hate when I do that, right, Well, no,
I was just the name sounded Familier and it was
from a creepy pasta that I had read, and that's fine.
But now he is dead. He died in two thousand.
Who am I thinking of somebody from four chand maybe

(38:44):
probably that's what it is. I'm getting the two mixed
up because okay, yeah, that's my bad. Yeah, screwed up.
Thank you for correcting me. You're welcome. My googling during
shows pays off filing. She's not just facebooking. Yeah, okay,
so I'm an idiot. Okay, well that would feel flat.

(39:07):
Let's move forward here. No, not the final theory, got you? Yeah,
let's let's do that We've got another one, which is
that in someone got on four Chan and shockingly claimed

(39:28):
that they were responsible for the entire thing. First of all,
the person who claims that they did the whole thing
really put some major holes in the story, and that's
by specifically what they said they did. The person that
claimed credit for the Max Headroom broadcast interruption on four

(39:50):
Chan said that they were in a TV studio and
no one else was around and they did it themselves.
Of course, that happens all the time, all the time.
The problem is is that the cameras that are in
TV studios, the quality and the caliber of them, it's

(40:10):
vastly superior, especially in to what is available to the
general public, or not even just that, just vastly superior
to what we saw in the broadcast. And that's exactly it.
But but did this guy say he made the film
in the TV studio? I mean, it could have. It's

(40:31):
possible he made the video somewhere else. And would just
bear with me on that question, because the next problem
in their their claim actually answers that. But let me
let me finish up with this, which is, yeah, as
Devin said, you know, this thing is crappy quality, So
there's no way it was done on a TV studio camera.

(40:56):
The other problem is, you know, I'm not even go
into why there was a piece of spinning corget and
a Max Headroum mask and a rubber finger slash fallus
in a TV studio. That doesn't sound like something that's
at the Home Shopping Network And I don't know why
that's in there, and I'm just gonna kind of leave
that alone. But at SNL and studio I could see

(41:20):
nowhere else could I see, although I guess not in
the studio they can have proper rooms for that stuff. Yeah,
that's true. Yeah, I can't hard to imagine smuggling a
piece of corgetd tin into the into the studio too
a little Yeah, that would that would not go buy
security easily. So back to your question. That question, Okay,

(41:40):
person said they did it live. There's a problem with that. Okay, Yeah,
there's a gut problem because Max goes from jumping around
and screaming with his head in the air and a
direct cut to the butt slash fly swatter scene. Okay,
if that is done live, there's no way one person

(42:01):
could do that, never mind that other person was standing
there there's no way that could have been done live
because it happened like that. Yeah, that's that's impossible. Yeah,
and the second person who was obviously rotating the corrugated
to him back and forth, and then you know, so
after the cat it stops rotating, so he's he's now
from impersonating a woman and with the fly swatter or she. Yes,

(42:26):
whether it is or is not a woman, we don't know.
We don't even know if the person playing Max Headroom
is a man or not. We're just that that's just
a kind of a supposition based on the mass. Yeah,
well in the size, and I think it's a reasonable
it's a reasonable presumption, but it could be wrong. It

(42:46):
could very well be Okay, So I again, I'm completely
discounting the four chan claim responsibility that came through in Well.
The other thing about the other problem that I have
with for Chen is he said it was in the
TV studio, and he did, and he did it live.
But we're talking two different studios here and two different

(43:09):
radio transmitters, right right, Yeah, so sometimes managed to give
himself alone into two studios in the same evening or
somehow interrupted both signals. Yeah, I mean that's That's exactly
the thing, okay, is that you would think that if
somebody was investigating this and they went, oh, you know,
it's funny w g N and w T t W

(43:34):
their studios are close together, and their transmitters are close together,
and funny thing is there's another studio directly in between them.
Maybe we should check that. But that's not the case.
As far as I can tell, there wasn't another TV
studio between the pair of them. So again, how would
that person have overridden the signal? Yeah? And then and
then the next problem is is that say say it

(43:56):
does it from w g N earlier in the evening
and then between in that and eleven eleven plus o'clock,
they think people are gonna be showing up the studio
to find out what the hell happened with the earlier
they did. Actually, that's the things the studios the first studio,
w g N, they knew they'd been hacked because by

(44:16):
switching channels they were done. I believe it was w
t TW. They were positive it was an inside job,
and they freaked out and they combed the building, presuming
that somebody had gone through and switched the feed internally
rather than overpowering the signal, which I think they kind

(44:41):
of wasted valuable time in doing that because they could
have been trying to figure out where it had happened.
But yeah, they were. They were convinced that it was
an inside job, but there seems to be no proof
of that. There's nothing that we can say. You know,
a videotape or a beta cassette tape. If you don't
what a beta cassette tape is, look it up WI.

(45:06):
A beta or a VHS tape was not found anywhere.
You know, that smoking tape wasn't there, Okay. Next, the
next theory, which I know Devon likes this one because
Devon actually led me down the path to find which
I'm really glad you did because this is this is

(45:26):
it's a very fun one. The first the story first
came out actually on Reddit, so we went from Fortune
to Reddit, which devinviously says redit spore Web and a
guy who we eventually find out his name is Bowie Pogue.
He posted his theory of what was going on, and

(45:50):
here's his story. He says that he met a group
of guys in the late eighties that were older than
he was. It sounds like he was a high school
kid at the time. One version of the story. He
was like, I think there's only one version of this story,
the redded version, and yeah, I think it's junior high
to high school. He's weird teenage adolescents. And I don't

(46:15):
remember how he met these guys either, but it was
some weird way. Yeah, it was a weird way while
he was to BBSs and stuff like that, and he
seems to have met people through that that spear stuff.
It was kind of a weird nerd scene. It was
a new scene. It's a weird nerd okay, now it's okay.

(46:40):
Really threw me off my game. But somehow he befriended
a couple of guys in a group that were older
than he was, and they let him hang out. And
the two particular people of interest in this story, Poe
refers to him as J and K. He's protecting their

(47:03):
their identities. He doesn't want to disclose who they are
because he doesn't know this for sure, and we'll get
into some of it later on. But according to him,
JA was slightly autistic, or he might have had Asperger's
it's unclear, and he doesn't even seem to be positive
of the distinction in his descriptions, So I don't want

(47:26):
to draw guesses. Yeah, we have no The only thing
we have is that exactly describes him. He's got a
sort of strange effect. He does strange effect that necessarily
mean he did have any kind of thing. He kind
of could have just been like a weird dude. He
just had a personality disorder. Yeah, but he did have

(47:46):
a strange sense of humor. And the guy that is
referred to as K was his brother, and K helped
take care of J. If you I don't think we're
going to post the link to this on the website.
Our way to the reddit thread, because if not, I
was just gonna say, if you're interested, like message us
and I'll make sure we send it. Because it's with

(48:07):
a few Google Max headroom broadcast interruption, one of the
first links that comes up is the reddit thread, so
people can find it that way. I don't know if
it'll be one of the ones that we put up
because it's in a number of the other links that
we've got, but the thread is super easy to find.
I Devin told me about it, I went home, I

(48:27):
just put in that search term and I kid, you not.
It was the third one that came up on the SAE.
If you're on Reddit, message us, then we'll send it
to him. Okay, okay, do that. On the day of
the interruption, he hung out with these guys, the same
group of older guys, and in the course of their conversation,

(48:49):
and again this is a truncated version of this story,
but they mentioned in conversation that something big was going
to happen that night, and when he eventually asked him
what they were talking about, he told him, well, watch
Channel eleven tonight. That was the same night as the

(49:11):
broadcast interrupted. No on that day, exactly around there. Okay.
Po goes on to describe, and this is part of
the compelling evidence that he provides is he goes on

(49:32):
to describe the mannerisms of j which he feels are
directly reflective of the behavior of Max in the tapes
that we see. He also says that Ka the brother
had a lot of computer technology available in their apartment,

(49:53):
tons of computers, and Jay had the technical knowledge to
pull it off. One thing that he does point out
is that if it is J on the tape, he
would have been the right age to know the theme
song from Clutch Cargo, which again from the nine sixties. Yeah,

(50:16):
because they were they were older guys. They weren't late teenagers,
they were adults. Yeah, And and Jay was supposed they're
like in his early thirties. Even he was liked than
his brother Kay seven. We're talking if he was born
in sixty were talking a thirty something year old guy. Yeah, Yeah,

(50:37):
I don't know. I mean some shows they ended, they
go into syndication and they get rerun endlessly on some
of the secondary channels. Haven't I don't know Clutch Cargo,
but there were there were a lot of shows like
Star Trek, for example, got rerun endlessly local station. So
about Clutch Cargo, you know, frankly, even though I was
alive in the sixties, I don't remember it at all.
So yeah, I don't know. And it doesn't strict me

(50:59):
as something that went up in ran And of course
back in the eighties we didn't have like Hulu and
Netflix and stuff like you would have had to see
it on TV or have parents who owned vhs of
it or something. And you know, that's actually something that
we didn't talk about. The reason that people have this
is that a lot of people had VHS and they

(51:20):
liked Doctor Who's all these people in Chicago were recording
the Doctor Who episode, So that's the only reason that
the broadcast interruptions survived. I would say that's also the
reason that that one is so much more prevalent on
the internet than the news one, because who tapes the news. Yeah, no,
there's I've only seen one copy of it, and it's

(51:43):
obviously it's the same one, starts at the same place,
ends at the same place, But there are multiple versions
of the Doctor Who. So there's a lot of people.
That's reason You're absolutely right that we still know about.
But we're not done with post story, like I said,
and he has said very openly and adamantly in his

(52:06):
Reddit posts that he doesn't want to disclose who these
guys are. He has tried to get in contact with them,
and they are non commutative with him communicative, thank you.
I really don't know how to say that work. They
will not talk to him, and so he's left it
at that, and he won't he won't push anymore. There's

(52:27):
a great Motherboard article which I know we will put up,
and that person has also agreed to to not try
to pursue it anymore. He actually use pose his source
and Poke Poe not Edgar Allan Pope, but he mean,
so we don't know who it is. And on a

(52:49):
related note, Pope also denies vehemently that he is the
person who did the interruption. The people who did that. Yeah,
it's and we see this, and I'm glad that he's
smart enough to say this, as we see people all
the time, oh, I know who did it to stir
up a lot of a lot of interest in the story,

(53:10):
when really they're the one who did it. They're getting
some self gratification out of it. So it's it's I
lend him a little bit of credit for in his
initial things saying I did do this, so stop asking
me if I did it. I think, you know, the
reason I pointed you to this thread was because I
thought his story was actually very compelling. I didn't have

(53:32):
a whole lot of problems with it. I found it
very believable. I did too, and I'm not sure that's
it's really this positive, but yeah, I don't know. At
the very least, it's it is very believable. I think
he's got his facts in a row, and I think
the way he tells it is very honest, and I
think the way that he has continued to respond to

(53:55):
it seems very honest as well. You know the fact
that he says, I don't want you to know who
these people are. I just want you to know that.
I think, I know, you know, I want to tell
the story of the people behind it, and sticks to
his guns about that, and I think, I don't know.
I like the story. I will be honest. I think
I said this before, is that it's all circumstantial. Oh, absolutely,

(54:20):
it's all anecdotal. It's that's my hardest Absolutely, that's the
one thing that sticks in my craw the whole way
through his version of events is it's his version of events.
I got nothing to back it up with. So that
I like it. I agree with you. I like it. Fairness,
there's no solid evidence pointing towards literally anybody. I wouldn't

(54:45):
say that. Oh oh, you wouldn't say that. Oh okay,
Mr know it all says stuff posting the show. What
how what what you found? Well, if you had been
old enough to watch Max Headroum, I don't kidding. Now,
you know. The last theory that I've got, which this

(55:05):
is The one that I actually think is the best
one based on what we have available to us, is
that it was a disgruntled employee or ex employee. And
and before you your wig out on me, bear with
me through this, okay. Could have been an inside job,
so the station might have been correct in looking around

(55:28):
internally for who the guy was, but it might not
have been a guy actually in the studio because, if
you think about it, whoever pulled this off had to
have a lot of working knowledge of how the TV
stations worked. And who else has the better information than

(55:49):
the people that work in the studio or the engineers
that work at the station. So if some dude is
peeved did his boss or gets fired and wants to
poke them in the eye, this is an easy way
to do it, and they would have the knowledge on
how to do it. Think about this. Wait, wait, I

(56:12):
see that look, But bear with me. Do you remember
all those lines that we read of what Max said
the world's greatest nerds and uh talking about Chuck Swartsky
and stuff like that. Who is the network that keeps
getting ripped on? In all of the lines that Max says,

(56:34):
h w g N, Well why did he go? Why
did Max go to w T t W because w
g N shut him down and locked him out and
he only had the opportunity to make it happen at
w T t W. Well, if Max was angry at
all TV stations or all Chicago stations, I would think

(56:59):
that there would be more rips on, more characters that
were known in the broadcast industry there. But instead, the
only people and the only establishments that get directly ripped
on our w g N and its employees Coke is

(57:20):
Coke is because it's I think, honestly, it's a direct
relation to the Max Headroom character doing the new Coke
commercials just for fun. But all of the all of
the dialogue is aimed mostly at screwing with them, which

(57:40):
makes me think that it had to be some kind
of employee, somebody that knew the system and knew all
of that internal information. I mean, w g N, I'm sorry,
did who knew that that stood for World's Greatest Newspaper?
Probably only people that worked there, because it was probably

(58:02):
splattered all over the walls on motivational posters and crap
like that. So that's that's why I personally, I don't
have any evidence, but there's not a lot of evidence
here to start with, but we kind of That's why
I leaned that direction mostly when you think about it, Yeah,
the that at least gives a motive, because otherwise, what
exactly is a motive for doing this besides just being

(58:23):
an as Yeah, I guess, but I guess like on
the other hand, is what's the motivation for being a
crazy Max Headroom? Right? If you're a disgruntled employee, like
you just knock him off the air for a little while.
I mean, you know, it's the fact that you do
this like weird crazy broadcast that's sue disjointed and mind melty,

(58:43):
what's the point behind that as well? Right? So for me,
it's a little bit of a either side. I'm not
going to disagree with that at all. There's not I
don't know why it wasn't Mickey Mouse. It could have
been Mickey Mouse, a mask that the guy had been
wearing doing something. It could have been a Nixon mask.
I mean, it could have been anybody. It could have

(59:05):
been anybody, and it may have been that they went,
oh hey, I happened to have a Max Headroom mask
from Halloween last year. Let's make it max Headroom. Obviously
it wasn't a real high budget film, right, it wasn't. Yeah,
but I think that if we wait like another years

(59:27):
and he'll leave, he'll leave as part of this, as
part of as a state and envelope. That's got a confession,
but I guess. So that's my big argument for the
Reddit thread is at least it explains why because it
was kind of mentally adduled youth, that screwy sense with

(59:48):
you know, people who are interested in hacking into things,
exploring how far they can push that with this weird
crazy this would be hilarious sense of umer right, So
for me, that's why that one sticks out more than
even a disgruntled employee. Not that I'm saying that a
disgruntled employee isn't valid, because it's almost just as valid.

(01:00:10):
But that's why I just to like wrap it up
like their addit theory the most you want to hear
A fun fact. Okay, if anybody watches the video, we've
already talked about the corrugated piece of metal, and it
took me a little bit, awhile, a little bit of
time to understand what I was reading is that the

(01:00:33):
FBI got involved in the case federal, it's a federal offense,
and they figured out somehow. They were like, oh, it's
got to be an a warehouse, and we got to
look for a place that deals in manufactured garage doors.
And I kept looking at the piece of metal that
was spinning around, going, that's not a garage store, you

(01:00:54):
ding dongs, that's a piece of corrugated metals. Out of
that of course, get it metal though, But I figured
it out earlier today is if you watch that video
when Max is talking at the camera and the piece
of metal is spinning back and forth, and you watch
the upper right hand corner of the video when the

(01:01:17):
square spins, it reveals what's actually behind it, and you
can see what looks like a stone or steel column
and then a giant roll up steel door apport a
very small part of what looks like a roll up door,
And that I think is where they pulled that, because

(01:01:38):
you can see it in the documentary. I noticed that
on the video too. But the problem is is that
there's a lot of commercial buildings around that have roll
up doors. Yeah, yeah, I don't know where they thought
they were going to get with this. Yeah, that's gonna
that's but it's a fun fact. So obviously everybody has

(01:01:59):
paused us at some point watch the video because they
couldn't take it anymore. Now they're going to depose it
and look again for that, but this time, please keep
the audio off. You guys, got any other theory ideas? Okay,
all right, Well, if you've got theories of your own,
you can always let us know. You can, of course,

(01:02:20):
go to our website, which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com,
leave a comment while you're there. Of course, you can
listen to and download the episodes directly from the website.
Very few people do that. You can actually go to
a regular place like iTunes and subscribe and download. If

(01:02:41):
you're on iTunes, take the time to leave us comment
and a rating. Those are the things that help other
people find us, because that moves us up to charts.
Of course, I know a lot of people are using apps.
There's a lot of podcasts apps out there. There's a
lot of streaming websites that were listed on. You can
always find us on. One of the ones I know
we are on is of course Stitcher, so you can

(01:03:03):
find us on Stitcher. Things seem to be good on
Stitcher at this point, so whole fier. Okay, it appears
to be good. Um, let's see. Of course, you could
find us on Facebook. We got the Facebook page and
the Facebook group find his friend dis like us as
Joe likes to find his friend to say, you can

(01:03:23):
find us on Twitter. We are thinking sideways, so find
us on there. We try to use Twitter a little bit,
but mostly we just retweusing it. Have you well there
you go? Okay, definitely's using Twitter. So go ahead and
send us a message to me in a dater so
she has not can only do Twitter all day long.

(01:03:43):
It would be awesome. I don't have a job or
anything exactly. That's what I told him to do it.
You could send us an email. That would be good,
actual physical email email. I know, I really I want
somebody to send us a physical email because I've never
seen one. They'll probably print the letter and mail it
to us from their email. I don't know. If you're

(01:04:04):
tapping around a rock and you throw it on That
email address is Thinking Side Ofways podcast at gmail dot com.
Send us you if you an email. If of course,
you did the Max Headroum interruption. You have ideas, you
have thoughts, story, suggestions, anything, like that. We love to
feel them all, So go ahead and send us all

(01:04:26):
to us. And I think that's all the ways that
you can get ahold of us. You find a new
one and let us know. Uh that having been said,
we have gone on long enough, and I think it's
time to finish this one up. Yeah by everybody, really