The Max Headroom Incident: The Night Chicago’s TV Got Hijacked by a Mask, a Message, and a Mystery That Never Died
On a quiet Sunday night in Chicago—November 22, 1987—television did something it wasn’t supposed to do.
Not a glitch. Not a storm outage. Not a station error that a tired anchor could laugh off with a shrug. What happened that night felt… personal. Like someone had climbed into the screen and stared back.
For a few seconds, then for more than a minute, two different TV stations had their broadcasts hijacked by a bizarre pirate transmission featuring a person wearing a Max Headroom-style mask. The image was jittery, surreal, and unsettling—like a punk-art performance that accidentally wandered into millions of living rooms. Engineers scrambled. Viewers called stations. And law enforcement got involved.
Yet, despite the chaos and the fame of the footage, the biggest part of this story rem...




















