Max Headroom signal hijacking (Wikipedia)

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On the night of November 22, 1987, the television signals of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, were hijacked, briefly sending a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume to thousands of home viewers.

Chicago (Wikipedia) Chicago (/ʃɪˈkɑːɡoʊ/ shih-KAH-goh, locally also /ʃɪˈkɔːɡoʊ/ shih-KAW-goh; Miami-Illinois: Shikaakwa; Ojibwe: Zhigaagong) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and the third-most populous in the United States after New York City and Los Angeles. With a population of 2,746,388 in the 2020 census, it is also the most populous city in the Midwest. As the seat of Cook County, the second-most populous county in the U.S., Chicago is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Wikipedia) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a 1978 radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it was later adapted to other formats, including novels, stage shows, comic books, a 1981 TV series, a 1984 text adventure game, and 2005 feature film.

Captain Midnight broadcast signal intrusion (Wikipedia) On April 27, 1986, American electrical engineer and business owner John R. MacDougall (using the pseudonym “Captain Midnight”) jammed the Home Box Office (HBO) satellite signal on Galaxy 1 during a showing of the film The Falcon and the Snowman. The message, broadcast for four and a half minutes, was seen by the eastern half of the United States (accounting for more than half of HBO’s 14.6 million subscribers at the time) protesting HBO’s rates for satellite dish owners, which he considered too expensive. MacDougall was working at his second job as an operations engineer at the Central Florida Teleport uplink station in Ocala, Florida, and vied with a technician at HBO’s communications center in Hauppauge, New York, for control of the transmission. The technician attempted to increase uplink power but gave up because of the risk of damaging the satellite. MacDougall eventually abandoned his control of the satellite.