The TV Hijacking Chicago Never Solved
On November 22, 1987, sports anchor Dan Roan looked into the camera and said, "Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I." Seconds before, WGN-TV's nine o'clock news had vanished. In its place: a man in a Max Headroom mask, swaying in front of a sheet of corrugated metal, buzzing with static. Roan joked that the computer "took off and went wild." Then the signal snapped back. The intrusion had lasted about thirty seconds.
The TV Hijacking Chicago Never Solved
Category: Unsolved Mysteries Topic: Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion (Chicago, November 22, 1987) Length: 135 seconds (~360 words) Read by: voiceover narrator (third person, deadpan with a slow lift on the kicker)
On November 22, 1987, sports anchor Dan Roan looked into the camera and said, "Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I." Seconds before, WGN-TV's nine o'clock news had vanished. In its place: a man in a Max Headroom mask, swaying in front of a sheet of corrugated metal, buzzing with static. Roan joked that the computer "took off and went wild." Then the signal snapped back. The intrusion had lasted about thirty seconds.
Two hours later, the same masked figure returned.
At eleven-twenty, viewers of WTTW, Chicago's PBS station, were watching Doctor Who's "Horror of Fang Rock" when the picture cut out. The Max Headroom face came back, but this time it stayed. For roughly ninety seconds, the figure rambled through garbled non sequiturs — riffing on New Coke, on a sportscaster named Chuck Swirsky, on the WGN call letters, on the old cartoon Clutch Cargo. The bit ended with the man dropping his pants and being spanked by an accomplice in a French maid costume. Then the signal returned to the lighthouse.
WTTW spokesman Anders Yocom told reporters his engineers "attempted to take corrective measures, but couldn't." No one was at the transmission tower. WGN had managed to switch sources in seventeen seconds. PBS had no one to switch to.
What the hijackers had done required real equipment and real know-how. To override both signals, they needed a transmitter strong enough to drown out two of Chicago's biggest stations on the same Sunday night. The FCC said the maximum penalty would have been a hundred-thousand-dollar fine and a year in prison. Federal investigators opened a case. Tips came in. Internet sleuths spent decades on it.
The statute of limitations ran out in 1992.
Almost forty years later, no one knows who the figure in the mask was, who held the camera, who paid for the equipment, or what any of the inside jokes meant. The only thing we know for sure is that two complete strangers hijacked the airwaves twice — and then walked off into the dark with a perfect record.
Sources
Direction notes
Direction Notes — The TV Hijacking Chicago Never Solved
Tone
Deadpan, low-energy narration on the setup — like a late-night news rewind. Voice gets noticeably quieter, not louder, on the kicker. Treat the absurd details (French maid, Clutch Cargo) with a straight face — the deadpan IS the joke. Faint trace of unease underneath the entire read.
Pacing
- Target run time: 135 seconds
- Reading speed: ~160 wpm; slow to ~125 wpm on the final paragraph
- Beats / pauses:
- Hard half-beat after "so am I." Let the quote breathe.
- Two-beat hold after "the same masked figure returned." That's the pivot.
- Beat before "The statute of limitations ran out in 1992." — single-sentence paragraph, deliver it like a verdict.
- Slow the entire final paragraph to a near-whisper. Especially "with a perfect record."
Emphasis cues
- "so am I" — Dan Roan's live confusion is the cold-open hook; lean on it.
- "the same masked figure returned" — escalator line; this is where the story turns from "weird glitch" to "coordinated event."
- "ninety seconds" — viewers underestimate how long this is on air; sit on the word.
- "No one was at the transmission tower." — quiet, almost embarrassed delivery.
- "ran out in 1992" — flat. No drama. That's the punchline.
- "a perfect record" — last words of the script; trail off slightly.
B-roll / visual hooks (optional)
- Cold open: VHS-era WGN news lower-third filling the frame, then a hard cut to color-bar static.
- Insert: black-and-white still of a corrugated metal sheet rotating slowly.
- Insert: clip frame of a darkened transmission tower with a single red beacon blinking.
- Lower-third "11:20 PM" timestamp when WTTW intrusion is mentioned.
- Final beat: a single empty broadcast control room chair, lit by monitor glow.
Music / SFX
- Bed: low-frequency analog hum, barely audible, mirroring 1980s transmitter noise.
- Sound design: brief burst of static at every section break — duck under narration.
- Final paragraph: drop the bed entirely. Voice-only for the kicker, then a single soft static pop on "perfect record."
Provenance
Metadata — The TV Hijacking Chicago Never Solved
- Category: unsolved-mysteries
- Topic slug: max-headroom-broadcast-hijacking
- Date: 2026-05-17
- Generated by: Claude Code (
script/categories/audio/voiceover-script-generator/) - Workflow prompt:
My-Library/Content/Voiceover-Scripts/Prompts/generate-voiceover-script.md - Word count: 360
- Estimated read time: 135 seconds at ~160 wpm
- Research tool: WebFetch (serper MCP returned HTTP 400 on every request during this run; substituted WebFetch against authoritative Wikipedia entries to preserve the sourced-research requirement)
- Cover image model: nanobanana (Gemini Flash Image)
- Cover image prompt: Vintage cathode-ray television in a dim room with a faceless geometric mask emerging through scan-line static; moody Chicago skyline silhouette behind; editorial-tech illustration in cold electric blue, signal red, deep navy, warning amber; 16:9; no text, no logos, no faces.
- Sources:
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