Selects: The Max Headroom Affair

it's pretty good. And this is Stuff you should Know. Josh ed Room. Thank you you've been I saw you over there with your earbuds today. You were working on this all day, weren't you. I watched season one, episode one of Max Headroom, like the last ten minutes is still pending, okay, but it's crazy Like Max Headroam himself doesn't show up until like forty minutes into the first hour long episode, but when he does, it's dynamite. So what are we talking about. We're talking about Max Headroom,

that's right. A huge shout out at the beginning of this two buis dot Com, specifically Motherboard, specifically Alex Pasternak, Yeah, who wrote the article on Motherboard, And we actually we used to blog a little bit for them back in the day. I remember that. Yeah. I don't think they like to talk about that or acknowledge it publicly, you know, I don't think so. Oh, I think it was mutually beneficial. I'll bet you can't find those on motherboard anymore. I'm

trying to remember. I'm sure they were, like I think I read one about driving a stick shift versus automatic or something weird. That's a big one. Yeah. We started out with an old fashioned recipe. I think, yeah, that was you. They were like, let's do better than this guy's and we said no, and then they said we got our own people. Yeah, well let somebody come in

and ghost right for you. Yeah. So that Motherboard articles the basis and from what I found, I mean, we we used a lot of different sources on this, but this article entitled the Mystery of the Creepiest Television Heck is sort of the culmination like the Kuda gra kDa

Graw of Max Headroom incidental articles. Yeah, it actually really good job past her neck, like very exhaustively investigated it and turned up new information, got new new um, a new understanding of it and basically contributed to the mythos of it himself. So a way to go pastor neck right, And what we're talking about is if you if you don't know who Max Headroom at all is, We're about

to set that up. Yeah, let's talk about Max headrom But if you were alive during the nineteen eighties, then you probably know who Max had Room is because weirdly, for a brief few years it was kind of a big pop culture thing about four years by my by

my calculations. So starting in there was a movie called Max Headroom Colon so you know his an important movie twenty Minutes in the Future, right, and it was a kind of a cyberpunk movie, Um dys Topium future very Terry Gilliam brazil ish um, and it was I'm not I haven't seen that one, but it was basically where the character of Max Headroom was born, right, And I think it actually formed the basis for the TV show later In between the later TV show that you and

I are more familiar with and that movie, Max Headroom was a pop culture sensation. He was a pitchman for New Coke. I went and watched an old ad. He was in an ad with run DMC pitching you coke, and I was like, doesn't get any more eighties than this? But it was actually a pretty cool ad, right was it? Did it say here's a little story A need to tell about a new coke on the scene that he loved. So well, that was exactly word for word how that

ad went. So so let's back up a little more. Right, Okay, let's describe what Max Headroom is for the kids, because I guarantee about eight percent of our our audience are like, what's the eighties? What's new coke? Who's run DMC? Well that's probably not true, but what so what was Max Headroom? He was builed as like the first virtual um talk show host, right correct? Okay, yeah, so he was played by guy named Matt Frewer, who, out of prosthetic makeup,

had that look anyway, very chiseled, square jawed. He was not bald, but had he had a receding hairline. Okay, but he kept it really really short, so he kind of looks bald. Yeah, here, this will explain it to all the kids at home. He was a colleague of Murphy Brown and the Murphy Brown Television. Yeah, they're like, oh that guy, Yeah, not the painter, the other one, the love interest. I don't think I knew that. I never watched Murphy Brown though. Oh man, I hope that

was him. I'm pretty sure it was him. Yeah. Yeah, well he's been around, he's still acting today. But yes, he played the character of Max Headroom, and the TV show Max Headroom was actually pretty far ahead of its time,

totally speaking. Yeah, So the whole, the whole premise of the TV show The Last his big last, great gasp that was actually the most serious of all of it was where in the future TV networks controlled the world, and there was the station that network twenty three that Matt Frewer's character and later Max Headroom, who became his alter ego, worked for. We're putting these things called blip verts out. Yeah. His his character's name was Edison Carter

at first, and he was like an investigative journey list. So, um, he starts looking into these blip firts because the problem with blip firsts they are thirty second ads compressed into three seconds, and it's meant to keep you from changing the channel. The problem is that everybody watched so much TV by this time, they didn't move around, which meant that all of the electricity generated by their nerve endings wasn't burned off as how the how the show explained it.

So when their brains were assaulted with these blip furts, they kind of short circuited, and all that electricity that was just hanging around their bodies because they weren't moving at all during the day, made them explode. The network really liked blip verts and they didn't want to get rid of them, so they decided to instead get rid of Edison Carter. Yeah, and the TV advertising at the time, or advertising in general sort of not only did TV rule the world, but the ads behind it was really

the driving force. It sounds very familiar, it does. Everyone's like, take a blip furture, give me a three second ad

on the podcast guys, it will blow you up. So what they what ended up happening was was the character of Edison Carter eventually was there was an incident not the Max Headroom, It's in it where he was left in a coma in an episode the first episode, Oh yeah, the pilot of course, and the last thing he sees before falling into a coma is a sign that said Max Headroom colon two point three meters uh, and so

that's how he got the name Max Heterom. Right. It was in like a parking garage and it was basically saying, this is the overhead clearance. Is the way it's put in the United States. Yeah, right, so that's the name Max Headroum. Right. But he was an AI character, right, So the the Evil TV network got ahold of him, uploaded his brain um and they originally did this with the intent of bringing Edison Carter because again he was like their star reporter, bring him back in virtual forms.

They created an artificial intelligence. Well, it was kind of glitchy and blippy and it looked weird, so they threw it out. Well, some pirate broadcasters got ahold of this, this database that that Max Hendrom lived on, and they started broadcasting with him, and Max Hendrom was born. That's right. And you said glitchy and blippy, and that kids explains your intro when you went to Josh. Yeah, yeah, I was doing thank you for explaining that. Yeah, that bears

Josh was He's He's okay everybody. So that's what Max Headroom did. It was jittery, it was blippy. Like you said, the background was this weird sort of horizontal and diagonal line moving around thing, and that was all part of this at the time sort of futuristic look. He was also really sarcastic and really catty, and he was really um. He poked fun at censorship, and he was just kind of like a cult hero just the character itself. Right.

The awesome thing about him is in the real world of we didn't have any kind of computers that could generate a c g I post, so they actually used like prosthetics, Like there's a four hour process to put Matt frew Er into the Max Headroom makeup. So it's the guy acting and then you know, they messed with the video a little bit. But it wasn't a c

a c g I version of a guy. It was a guy acting like he was a c g I version of himself, right, which is why if, for instance, if Max Headroom the character were to appear on say David Letterman, which he did, it would be Letterman interviewing a TV screen, which is what they did. But it was actually Matt Freuer in another studio. He was probably just backstage broadcast and it's really like, as a kid, I did not get all this. No, I just thought it was a I didn't you know what it was

because I've never seen the show. I thought he was the coke guy, right, right, And I think I've seen the show a little bit. I was like, this is way too grown up for me. Um, But I think I just kind of took it on faith that he was computer generated or something like that. I didn't really think about it much. But now as an adult looking back,

I'm like, that is brilliant and really difficult. And the fact that they did this and pulled it off as well as they did, it's it's it's a it's a pretty amazing thing, right, And you can kind of understand how Max Headroom with all that information now became this kind of cult icon, especially among cyberpunks at the time,

and what just keep saying cyberpunk. So so let me let me I'm I'm I'm not like particularly well versed in like what constitutes cyberpunk, but like it's like pornography to a Supreme Court justice, Like I know it when I see it, right, Sure, So if you watch the Max Headroom show, you're like, that's cyberpunk. RoboCop is supposedly cyberpunk, right. It's like a bleak technological future where people are controlled by almost down to their minds, by the government or

some corporation or some amalgamation of the two. That's pretty cyberpunk, right. So at the time you had what are called geeks and nerds, but they are not really what you would call the geek or a nerd today. Right, somebody who wears like glasses that don't actually have prescription glass in them? Do people do that? That's some people do. I did that in the fourth grade. Well, then you were a

geek apparently. No. I was a prep and I wore those little tortoiseshell round uh preppy glasses because that was a cool look. And actually, when it's it's one of my least proud moments fashion wise, has actually bought fake glasses and wore them around. You have photos of those. I'd really have to dig through some boxes. I think I speak for everyone when I say started digging dig Yeah, it was not my proudest moment. Yeah, I'd like to

see that picture. So um, at the time, people who were geeks and nerds, that whole culture was very much derided and pushed around. I mean, look at the Revenge of the Nerds, right like they came out on top. I watched a little bit of that just the other night. This is probably the earliest celebration of nerd culture. It was not something that was like venerated or subscribed to

by anyone who wasn't a genuine nerd or geek. And these were a very rarefied group of people who really knew what they were doing with computers at a time when almost no one else did. Early adopters across the board very much so. Right, so, so Max Drum is kind of a cult hero to this guy, and um, that kind of sets up what happened on November twenty two in a little town called Chicago, Illinois, the city of dusty city that doesn't ever sleep, never, the windy city.

That's it. There you go of all time, the windy city of all time. Yeah, so that sets the stage. We know who who the character of Max Headroom was? Then? Yes? Are you sure I set the stage? I think so? Did we set the stage fully? Here? It looks nice? All right? Let's do so at pm on that November night in Chicago, four days before Thanksgiving. Yeah, so everyone was in that frame of mind. Put yourself there. I think that that helps a lot. It helped me at

least football seasons going on. Yeah. As a matter of fact, just that very day, the Bears had beat the Lions, which you know, it's a long time ago. Because the Bears won a football game, the people in the Windy City of all time are not going to be happy with you for that city time. Oh and there is a sportscaster on local channel nine, uh Dan Rone r A N and he was he was going over the highlights of that football game. Then all of a sudden, right in the middle, the broadcast signal goes, it makes

those noise noises. And then over at w g N the control room, they were like, what's what's going on here? We have no idea what this is. I think the exact quote was a girl. So Um. What happened was they eventually what what what they were doing at the time was. And this is how We're not going to go into the weeds here on how broadcast signals work.

But what they did back in the day was they broadcast microwave transmissions to antenna's at the top of the tallest buildings of whatever city that they were in for local TV, for local TV, which is I mean there was cable at the time, but local TV still kind of ruled, yeah, and in the well sort of in the late eighties, right, So like darting to Segue, Yeah, for sure, cable is you know, kind of a thing. But you if you were a local TV station, you still have a pretty big market share of it, right,

especially w g N in Chicago. I mean it's like Chicago station, right absolutely. So what you what I think you're saying is that in a studio, whatever they're recording or shooting or playing on their their little video tapes, they're they're beaming that from the actual studio to a transmitter, say atop a very tall building, and then that just

kind of bounces around to other transmitters. And that's how everybody in Chicago gets their w g N signal, right, Right, So all of a sudden, during the sportscast, it skits is out and then all of a sudden you see a a guy in a suit, uh wearing a max headroom mask and it was there was no audio that was I guess the problem with this first intrusion that was called a broadcast intrusion. Yeah, but you couldn't hear anything.

But I'm sure it was certainly distressing to a viewer to see this kind of weird thing happened, especially if viewer who wanted to know what the heck happened between the Bears and the Lions that day. And Um, the whole thing lasted I think like eleven seconds or some

very short amount of time. Yeah, this was a short one before um, the w g N engineers went and switched to the backup transmitter and and I guess transmitted on a slightly different signal and brought the broadcast the sportscaster back on and Dan Rone was like, uh, if you're wondering what just happened, so am I right? There's a chuckle in between. I wasn't going to do my impression of it, but it's good. You should watch it,

like somebody just go look it up. Right. So Federal Investigators, the FEC that is, was called in to investigate, um, what technically is well not technically, it's a crime to do so. And then just a few minutes later they thought, well, this is probably coming from inside the building, and so that's the first place they started looking, they said, the

intrusions coming from inside the building exactly. They didn't find anybody, though, I mean it was as you'll see after we explained further, it would make sense that you would look in the building, yeah, right, for something like this inside job. There apparently was not an inside job at least as far as the w g N Engineers Search was concerned. Right, right, So that

was at nine fourteen. About two hours later, I think, at eleven fifteen, on another channel in Chicago, w t t W, which was the PBS station, they were airing an episode of Doctor Who called the Horror on fang Island, fang Rock, fang Rock, Horror of fang Rock. You have to say it like that, though, the Horror of fang Rock. Thank you. And this is the Tom Baker doctor. Okay,

that's the only one I recognize that. Really he's seventies, right, Hey, I'm no doctor who, guys, don't it looked like it looked like the seven is what they cut in on. Look pretty seventies. It didn't look eighty seven, so who would think it would be seven? I'm guessing it was a rerun on PBS. That's what I think all right, we'll find out and oh man, we're going to find

out too. Are that would have been super easy to check? Yeah, at any rate, um the the in the middle of this Doctor Who episode, it suddenly cuts out again, and now you've got what appears to be the full run of this Max headroom intrusion. Yes, instead of thirty seconds,

this one was a minute in twenty two seconds. And right now I would say, if you are somewhere where you can pause and go to a video online video carrier of your choosing and type in Max headroom incident, spend the next minute in twenty two seconds watching it. We'll wait and we'll wait. We'll just in cert a minute seconds of silence here. How about this, Let's take a break and then we'll come back, and then we'll talk about exactly what happened during that minute in twenty

two seconds. Okay, we're back. Did you watch it? Are you talking to me? Okay, look at you. I'm guessing that people people did watch it. A few people did, smart ones did. Because this is really tough to describe, and we're going to try, but it's something you really have to see. You in here, it's genuinely disturbing sitting in an office years later watching it, and I can imagine if I was at home, I would have probably

been a little freaked out. You found it disturbing, Yeah, I found it hilarious in like a really juvenile way. It creeps me out. It was like watching David Byrne on acid at a talking head show. That's what I think of when I saw that. You know, all right, so let's let's describe the scene here. Okay, so you got Max Headroom, Well, actually a dude wearing a rubber mask, a rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom. And this this

is just genius to me. So you mentioned earlier about how the um Max headroom had like these kind of grid lines behind them at all times and they kind of moved and adjusted. They were different colors to do to to simulate that these guys had like a piece of corrugated metal, shiny metal, and I guess they had an attached somehow to something that rocked it back and forth, and they kind of somebody was clearly rocking it back and forth here there erratically, And it really does a

good job. It gets the point across that it looked like the maxid Room TV show. The Yeah, the back of the character. Yes, but again I would say that this person is very very clearly on acid. Well, I think what disturbs me, and I need to make it clear. It is definitely funny and stupid, But what disturbs me is the sound of the voice, which is all garble.

It's really like on YouTube. It has subtitles, thankfully because it's hard to make out, and a lot of times it just says can't you know understand what he's saying or whatever? Uh, and the garble quality and just the random weirdness that's going on. It's not like it was creepier to me than if V for Vendetta dude had to come on, Guy Fox had to come on and said, you know, we are coming into your thing to tell you this about this This was just so weird and

all over the place. It was creepy to me. Yeah, well yeah, yeah, I see what you mean, Like you're watching some somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah, felt watching somebody lose their mind. Right, Okay, yeah, totally get that. Um, And here's here's what the guy did that would make you feel like he lost his mind. Um, this is

the weird thing to me. It's it's very targeted towards w g N, right, almost so much so that some people would say this was clearly somebody who had a grudge against w g N. He makes fun of the bulls um sportscaster, the guy who worked for w g N at the time. He makes reference to how he just made a masterpiece for the Greatest World's Newspaper Nerds, which was a messed up version of w g n's call letters stand for World's Greatest Newspaper. He wields a

rubber penis. That's one. Although it was great and almost every article it was referred to as a marital aid. Did you see that? No? But uh, I actually guessed it on Strickland's Tech stuff like four years ago, and we covered this and I called it a marital aide, did you Okay? So I wanted to keep it clean. I realized that saying the word penis is okay, Well, it's clinical. I mean, we did a puberty episode, surely

we have the chops to say penis. But marital aide is hilarious, especially in this context like this crazy dude on acid wearing a max headroom mask. Is has a marital aid. No, he doesn't, that's not what that is in that context. Yeah, and that's a new T shirt. By the way, what we have the chops to say penis So that's a band name. Let's go ahead and use some of the let's go and say some of the direct quotes. So he comes on and he goes he's a freaking nerd. I think I'm better than Chuck Swarsky,

freaking liberal. That's a really good impression of it. And Chuck Swarsky was the Bulls guy. Yeah, the sports announcer. And this is a time too when like the Bulls were um, this is the Jordan Pippen era. Still I mean well still was at the beginning of it was seven. I thought it was like in the middle of it. M hmm. Was at the beginning pretty early earli ish. Let's say, I wish these days is that I would have been more cognizant and like more into basketball than

like I am. Now. See, that's when I was the most into it was bird Jordan's magic toatch some of those games. Yeah, that was good stuff because that's when the Hawks were good back then. Yeah, back then, Dominique, Hey, shout out to Kent bays Moore. You know he listens to this show. Way, he's a fan. How did you find that out? Twitter? Yeah, that's great man. I love base I know, how do you not love bases? He's awesome. Man, He's brought right right now. That's so cool. Alright. So, uh,

Chuck Sworski's freaking liberal. Uh. He's wielding the rubber penis in the marital aide. He drops that. Then he picks up a new coke while you can't really tell if it's oh was it okay? I couldn't really tell. He picks up a can and but he says catch the wave, which is the new coke slogan. Right. Then he starts humming it's so random. Then he starts humming the theme song to the sixty show Clutch Cargo, which is weird

in and of itself. Sure, that's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths, it was just like a human mouth moving with that's disturbing. Yeah, that was. If you've seen pulp Fiction, it was the scene where Bruce Willis was a kid and Christopher Walkin comes in with the wristwatch scene. Um, that Clutch Cargo is playing on TV when he's watching it, right, but it is weird looking, right, so you would say, why did you

do the Clutch Cargo theme? Well, again, this is a w g N thing and apparently that's where you saw it as as a kid. Yeah, on UM in Chicago. Okay, so he says, also, your love is fading. I still see the X, which apparently is something from the last episode of Clutch Cargo. Yeah, that was the Big X or something. And then he says, what you're talking about earlier, I just made a joint masterpiece for all the greatest

World Newspaper nerds. But he should have said world's Greatest Newspaper Nerds w g in right, which you might find confusing, as I did too. But apparently the Chicago Tribune Company owns w g N TV, so they called themselves World's Greatest Newspaper TV. Right. W it's all coming together. It's so fact though. There you go. Then finally, towards the end, the camera cuts to a different angle. Uh, this one has the dude bent over with his bare butt hanging out.

His face is now off screen, but he's holding the mask still out like his head is in it, but it's not there is a person I say woman, but I don't know, but a person in a like an anti Oakley dress? Is that what it was? I didn't get that. Yeah, it looked like a prairie bonnet ensemble, but the bonnet kind of hides the face, so you don't know if it's a man or a woman. And they are spanking the bare butt with a fly swatter, right,

and he's worried about them coming to get him. They're going to get me, and then he says, come get me and uses a bad word, B word, the B word, and then it goes back to doctor Who. Yeah, as as just like it when it came in went out it just because it's like gone. Can you imagine seeing that live? And that while the people who saw it live, the next thing they would have heard was the doctor saying something like, oh, he died of an electric shock.

Must have died instantly. And then and everybody's just sitting there, mouths hanging open. It was Dr Who too, So it was probably a bunch of Chicago nerds watching PBS. Yeah, so all right, my inmitation was okay, but let's just play at least like a couple of lines from the real thing. Yeah, all right, so you did a pretty good impression. I think everyone can agree now, right, it's so strange. So this was an enormous thing, right, Like, um,

like people were watching this and we're aghast. Agog some people probably thought it was funny. Um. W g N reporting on it all over the place the next couple of days. Yeah, the newspapers had picked it up. Yeah, Um, there's this one. There's a compilation of w g M broadcasts, or it might may be more than just w g N of people in the street being interviewed. What do you think about this? One guy's like it's it's kind of like Cooligans throwing a brick through your window, you know,

to get your attention. There's a little kid who's like, very very funny. The star of the news, though, was this one doctor who fan uh, this lady who was not at all amused by this, and I just want to play her little segment. Okay, yeah, ann some viewers. No, I just thought it would be just a slight mess up, but that in the middle of it's going to be we're gonna have to tape over it. I just think

that's the funniest thing out of the whole, the whole thing. Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV he was so angry. Yeah, I didn't see that guy. I saw that in the Pastor Nech article. Yeah, he was mad. So there was a lot of mixed reaction. But the the the voice from on high that came from the FCC, who you said, we're called in pretty quickly. They were like, this is no laughing matter. You might think it's funny, it's not very funny. Okay, it's kind of funny, but

not really. And you can get a hundred thousand dollar fine in a year in jail for this kind of thing, so stop doing it. But at this point, by this point, it was actually a federal offense. It was a felony, A felony offense. Wait what was that? Days and confused cantering with the mailboxes a filon. I was like, wait a minute, I know that from somewhere. So the FCC gets involved in this, This is really interesting in this article.

The f B I got involved, to FB I was involved, Chicago p D like there was they were looking into it. Apparently the um man I is become obvious to me that I say the word apparently a lot, really a lot. I was listening to an episode, cueing an episode, and I was like stopped saying, apparently, Josh, yeah, I've started after ten years, I've started to notice some things about my own self. It's like a tick. I tried to

just avoid it. I tried to too normally I can, but man, it just came welling up into my awareness. Apparently it's certainly I'm gonna have to get over it at any rate. Um, the the there were a lot of different agencies working on this, but the trail went cold pretty quick. And you remember how you said that. Um, the w g N engineers started looking around the station.

I think what they were looking for was this somebody physically patching in to the transmission network the cable mask and yeah, either playing a videotape, which it's it seems pretty obvious it was pre taped or doing something like in a studio, but but that they would have to

physically patch into w g n's transmission network. Yeah, it's like when a car doesn't work and I opened the hood thinking I'm going to see a squirrel not gnawing on a cable two pieces now and frayed at the ends, right, now imagine that squirrel wearing a max hydroom mask and being on acid, okay, with a maritalaide. So um, And at first the FCC and the FBI and anybody who was in the know basically said, this was a very sophisticated attack. It would have required a very very some

very expensive equipment, a lot of electricity. Um, there's not a lot of ways that they could have done this. But later on in the pastor Neck article, and this is this is one of the ways Pastorne contributed to this whole thing. He talked to one of the SEC investigators and this guy basically did away with that that whole viewpoint that had lasted for almost thirty years, that it had to have been somebody with a hundred thousand dollar piece of equipment and you know, ten thousand dollars

worth of electricity. Over the minute and a half he was saying, No, you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this new for ten grand at the time, or you could have probably bought it for use for just a fraction of that, and um, it would have taken very little electricity. It would have just taken um,

some know how and good positioning. Really, Yeah, Basically, he was like you, it could have been done with like the size of a direct TV dish today, and all they would have had to do was get in a high enough location in between, like literally because they're beaming waves,

are beaming microwaves through the air. So he's like, all they had to do was get in between the original studio and that initial tower on top of the I think it was a John Hancock building for w g N. Yeah, yeah, and and have a stronger signal, right, so even just like a slightly stronger signal. So you remember how w g N has their studio transmission shooting up to the John Hancock building and then that transmitter shoots it out

to everybody else in Chicago. What what what? What I think you're saying is like if somebody was on the roof of another nearby building and they just shoot a transmission their own max headroom transmission at a stronger a stronger way or no, a stronger amplitude, that's what it is.

Of the same frequency. You just overpower cancels out what w g N is doing and instead it transmits your max headroom thing, and they would be closer to that broadcast towers yes, so, um, that would mean that it required far less electricity than you would think or that they originally thought, and a far less equipment to They also had a pretty good idea of where these people would have had to have done it, because they after they got shut out of w g M, they turned

their attention to w t t W, the PBS station, and they hijacked their signal. Well, w t t W shot their studio link to the Sears Tower. So this would have been somebody who was on a roof somewhere that had a clear view of John Hancock Building and the Sears Tower and could transmit to either one of them. But that's basically what they think happened. Yeah, and the guy you were talking about, Dr Michael Marcus, who at the time was the Assistant Bureau Chief in the fcc

S Field Operations Bureau. He was a lead investigator, and he said that the guy in Chicago that was sort of in charge wasn't super like he was just sort of used to traditional FEC investigations. He wasn't wanted to go knocking on doors and uh as to like investigate some kind of weird, kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes uh, it may or may not have a marital aid in his apartment. Just smack them on the whether and then uh.

They also, you know, nobody was being hurt, No one got hurt in the end, it was it was almost a victimless crime. So they didn't throw a ton of

resources at it. They were kind of like, listen, we're not gonna If you want to go investigate this, that's great you should, but we're not going to assign a team of twelve people to try and crack this case of a bunch of nerds who did a weird thing for a minute seconds and I think the longer it went on and there was no more of these intrusions from these guys, the fewer and fewer resources they had to work with, and it just kind of fell to

the wayside. Well, what's interesting is to at the in the beginning, they said it's gonna it would take somebody with a very expensive piece of equipment, a lot of electricity, and a lot of know how, And today the only one of those that's remaining is a lot of know how. There wouldn't have been a lot of people running around Chicago who would have known how to do something thing like this. Yeah. Um, so it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources that no one has ever been

really implicated in this one. I don't think we said no. They still don't know who did this. It's an unsolved mystery. Like Dennis Farina and Robert Stack, I love this one. Uh. The FBI, for their take, started concentrating on the actual video. They had the technology at the time, which is kind of funny now to think about it, but they're the only ones who had the technology at the time to actually make enhance frames of this videotape and print out,

you know, pictures enhance them. And they were kind of focused on this upper right hand quadrant, as they say, where the Antie Oakley was spanking with the fly swatter. I don't know why they're so into that, but they said, you know, we're trying to get clues on the actual location of the people who made the tape, not necessarily where they broadcast it from, but where did they shoot

the thing begin with. It was very little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal, and that could have been literally anywhere because it's a really tight shot, it really is. Yeah, and there was very little evidence given in the video. Yeah, I mean it says that they were looking at industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in an apartment living room. I mean, it wasn't like the door was a text anything. It

was freely spinning back and forth. So it didn't make not the best lead, right, So um over time and again this is weird too. It's it's not so weird that the FCC or the FBI didn't find who did this if they weren't really looking very hard. Was really weird is that no one has been like, it was these guys. I was there, I know these dudes. It

was these guys. Statute limitations is done, Like who cares after these guys would have gotten all scott free because the set of limitations for this one was five years, right. I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me, So I bomb. No one's done that, right. There was um some so very early forum like message boards stuff

took the form of bulletin boards services. I think BBS is really early geek culture, like like like Matthew Broderick dialing something with his phone and then putting it on that weird little you know, commodore sixty four thing the motum Yeah, to like transmit the dial tone over the telephone system, right, So, um, that's what that's what like the level of technology that these people were dealing with, but they were communicating with each other over like this

proto internet, these bulletin board systems. And two days after this, a guy named the Chameleon posted basically what you and I said about how all it took was these guys to go up on a tall building and overwhelm the w g N and the w T t W studio links. And it's so facto. I'm a big fan of that. By the way, Um, this this intrusion was successful, right

two days, not two years, not a year ago. Two days after it, somebody was on there explaining how it went out, So somebody knew this, right, But only two theories have really ever come to light as to who it was. One you can basically just throw right out, and the other one it turns out to have been a dead end. Yeah. The first one that you were talking about that doesn't really hold water was a and this was a rumor online for a while. I was a musician named Eric Fournier or Fournier furnier. I had

a friend in uh in pre school. I think, yeah, that's how it was spelled. F O U R in I E R. Actually I don't know how it was spelled. I couldn't spell back then. Um. So this guy was in a band, uh, and he did this weird, super creepy YouTube series called shay st John on s H A y E. Did you watch it? Oh? Yeah, I love it. Yeah, just I've knew that you would love it if you're ally. But this is genuinely unsettling too. I'm with you on that. So it kind of fit

and that he was doing these weird things. He had this band, Uh. They were in Bloomington, Indiana, not too far from Chicago, the Blood Farmers, Yeah, the bands of Blood Farmers, and they did these weird music videos and they thought this is the kind of guy that would have done that. And the thinking was that he went to go broadcast one of their weird music videos as a broadcast intrusion, but chickened out at the last minute because they would have been found uh, and then ended

up just improving. That part makes a little sense, because it definitely seems improved. It does, but it was also videotaped. Remember, So that means he would have had two video tapes with him. What do you mean? So if he was gonna if he was going to play the music video and said I'm not gonna do that, he would have had to have brought this other video tape. The other thing is apparently his. See I just said apparently again.

Alex Pastor Neck from Motherboard contacted some of Fernier's friends because Fernier died in two thousand ten, but his friends are like, absolutely not. Even some of the blood farmers are like, it wasn't him that, Like, I know what you're saying, and yeah, he did the whole Sha St John thing, but it was this was not him. It was not quite there. He didn't know what he was doing with it. He wouldn't know any broadcast stuff or video editing or anything like that. Yeah, so this other

one to me seems pretty promising. Uh So we flashed forward to when did this actually happen? Was this like by the time read it had to come around when it't on Reddit? Yeah, I think it was about twenty five years after, so it would have been in two thousand seven. Yeah, so there's this guy two thousand. Sorry. There was this guy named from Chicago named Bowie Pogue.

I didn't have any friends with that last name when I was a kid, and he was one of the kids hanging around those bbs is in the eighties in Chicago. From the sounds of it, he was on the younger side. He was thirteen, and even as a thirteen year old geek, was very much intimidated by the older geeks in that crowd, and so wasn't boisterous. He was sort of like, Hey, I'm kind of hanging out here and not saying much

and don't notice me. I just want to ingratiate myself and you guys can give me drunk you want, and then a party. He remembers this. Uh. He described him as a small, peculiar man that he thought was about in his thirties, and he had an older brother. They lived in Chicago. So Poe is describing these two guys who were in the same scene with him. Correct, Yeah, and he had uh They lived with his girlfriend downtown or about ten miles from downtown Chicago, and they had

the know how. They were super into computers. Early on you, he said, you went to their apartment and it was just like it looked like a computer hoarder, mess of wires and computers and equipment like Neo's apartment. Yeah, why not? Or what was the other one he was in before the Matrix Johnny Neumonic, Yes, yeah, Bill and Ted Yeah, Johnny Neumonic at Cyberpunk. Yes, right, yes, it is all right. You could probably make the case that the Matrix is

as well there, right, sure. So he described him as a stocky guy with tinted lens glasses in his early thirties and odd dude his brother, he said. He described it's just kind of normal. But he said that he didn't make the connection at the time, but at a party on November about the same day. Midday on November, he was at a gathering of these dudes at the brothers apartment and he heard them say something about doing something big. Later that night, they went to Pizza Hut

and He's like, what are you guys talking about? What's the big thing? And they said, hey, don't ask question, but just watched Channel eleven tonight on that same day. And I don't know how he didn't put it together that that's the one thing that really strikes me as fish. But he said that years later Now when he looks at it, he's like, even with that mask on, I see the body, I see what's going on. I hear that,

and it's it's that guy to me. But twenty five years later he was there that day, they tell him to watch that night, and he didn't put it together for twenty five years. That to me is the one fishy thing. Well, and he has been called out as fishy. Sure, I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy. Yeah. So that the guy the motherboard pastor Neck reached out and he said, you can you still get in touch with these guys all these years later? He said, he

sent them messages via Facebook. I don't even know if they saw him. They didn't get back. Then in the last sitch effort, he sent them a certified mail too. He found out where they lived, never heard anything back, and he was like, hey, it's clear that these guys don't want to be talked to, so you want to

take a break, Yeah, let's do it, Okay. So that's where it stands right now, like nobody knows who is behind it still to this day, which it is crazy and as a result, this Max Headroom hack has taken its place in like the pantheon of geek culture and of hacker culture, and rightfully so you know it's legendary in its own way. That's right. You got anything else?

I got nothing else on this one, cool man. Well, if you want to know more about Max Headroom, you should start by checking out this amazing Motherboard article by Alex Pastor Knack. And since I said amazing, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna go with let me go with the Almond Brothers eat a Peach from a Munchee. I don't know if it's true, but it's fine. I wanted to talk about when Josh talked about the Almond Brothers band factoid um because I think it's actually a

cool factoid. Dwayne Allman was once asked by a reporter what he was going to do for the war effort in Vietnam, and his response was, I'm going to eat a peach for peace. Dwayne died not long after that album, and Eat a Peach was released posthumously, so he contends Jesse Godet that that is where the album title came from, and the eat a Peach was not eata bid he or she i guess Jesse could go either way. Yeah, as always, keep up a good work. I'm currently brewing

beer and listening. Tell me where to mail some bottles or come pick them up in Salt Lake City. All right, we'll do both. It's like a challenge, right, they're too heavy. I'm sure I can't pick him up. Thanks a lot, Jesse, appreciate that, even though I still think I'm right. Um, if you want to contend that something one of us said is incorrect, we love that stuff. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast or movie Crush. You can hang out with us on Facebook, dot com

slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.