Shortly after nine o'clock on the evening of Sunday, November 22, 1987, viewers in Chicago watching the sports segment of the nine o'clock news on WGN-TV, channel 9, saw the picture tear.
The anchor, Dan Roan, was in the middle of a report on the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions. Then the screen was replaced. For somewhere between seventeen and thirty seconds — sources differ on the duration — the feed carried a figure in a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses, swaying in front of a sheet of corrugated metal, with garbled audio. The station's engineers cut the microwave link, and it stopped.
That was the first intrusion. The second was worse, and it is the one people remember.
A little after eleven o'clock that night, WTTW, channel 11, was broadcasting an episode of Doctor Who, Horror of Fang Rock. The same masked figure appeared inside it, and stayed for nearly ninety seconds. It ran that long because the tower had no engineer on duty that night and there was no backup procedure for a hijacked signal. Nobody could cut it. The intruder stopped on his own.
The content of the intrusion has been catalogued in exhaustive detail by people who care about this sort of thing. The figure mentioned Chuck Swirsky, a WGN sportscaster, by name. He held a can of Pepsi while reciting the Coca-Cola slogan, Catch the Wave. He hummed the theme from Clutch Cargo, a 1950s animated series. At the end, he exposed his buttocks and was swatted with a flyswatter.
The person behind the mask was never identified. No one was ever prosecuted. The FCC investigated, and by some accounts the FBI did as well; the conclusion was that over-riding two stations' microwave signals simultaneously would have required high-power transmitting equipment, and that the intruder was probably positioned somewhere he could see both the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. That is where the trail ends. Nearly four decades later, it is still where the trail ends.
Notice what this case is, and what it is not.
It is not a mystery with a missing clue. Everything about the broadcast was recorded and preserved: the dates, the times to the minute, both stations, the content, the duration, the technical requirements, the possible locations. The record is unusually complete. What is missing is precisely the one thing the record was never going to contain, which is a name. The intrusion was designed by someone who understood that the mask was the whole trick. There is no face to recover because the face was never transmitted.
It is also a reminder of something we have quietly forgotten about broadcast. We talk about television as a one-way medium: someone transmits, everyone receives. But the air was never one-way. It was a shared medium, and a microwave link is a link — which means anyone with enough power and enough line of sight can insert themselves into it. For a few minutes in November 1987, that theoretical possibility stopped being theoretical. Two stations in a major market were, briefly, not in control of their own signal, and the fact that it happened twice in one night shows it was not luck.
There is a detail worth lingering on. When the intruder on WTTW mentioned Chuck Swirsky, the joke was that he knew who the audience would recognise. The hijacking was not just technical; it was local. Whoever it was knew the market, knew the newscasters, knew that dropping a Pepsi can while saying a Coke slogan would land as a prank rather than a threat. That is a strange kind of intimacy to find inside a crime.
There is one more thing the record contains, and it is easy to miss. Both broadcasts used the same mask, the same voice treatment, the same corrugated-metal backdrop — a consistency that suggests preparation rather than improvisation. A prank is improvised on the spot; this was set up twice, on the same night, at two stations with different equipment. The intruder understood something the audience did not: that the only permanent artefact of a live intrusion is the recording, and that whoever controls what ends up on the recording controls the whole story.
So the archive of this event contains everything except the author, and the author is the only reason anyone would look. It is the strangest kind of record: complete in every detail that can be written down, and useless for the one question worth asking.
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