THE OBSIDIAN REGISTRY · TEXT MIRROR · no images, no scripts · index · full site · mirrors

FILE 077 · VOL XIV · Someone Is Still Broadcasting

Nobody Caught the Max Headroom Hijacker. We Found His Third Tape.

The mask was never the disguise. The face under it was.

Based on: The Max Headroom Hijacking

Intake record

Recovered file

Danny Okafor bought storage units for a living, sight unseen, two hundred dollars at a time, and he had learned to tell what was inside by the smell. Mothballs meant an old lady's furniture. Gasoline meant tools. Mold meant he had lost his money.

Unit 114 in Cicero smelled like nothing at all. That was what bothered him.

Inside, under a tarp, there was a sheet of corrugated metal, propped up like a wall. A rubber mask on a styrofoam head, the face of a grinning cartoon man with slicked-back hair and dark sunglasses. And a VHS tape in a plain black sleeve. On the label, in marker, two words.

BROADCAST 3.

Danny was thirty-four. He did not recognize the mask. His uncle did.

On the night of November 22, 1987, at 9:14 p.m., the sports report on Chicago's WGN-TV cut to black. [1] Then a figure appeared on screen. A man in a mask of Max Headroom, a famous TV character of the time, bobbing and swaying in front of a rotating sheet of corrugated metal. There was no sound but a buzz. Twenty-five seconds later, engineers at the station switched frequencies, and the image vanished. [2]

Two hours later, at 11:15 p.m., it happened again. This time on WTTW, the city's public station, in the middle of an episode of Doctor Who. [3] The masked man was back, and this time there was sound. He laughed. He moaned. He hummed a TV theme song. He said strange, rambling things. The broadcast ended with the man bent over, his pants down, being spanked with a flyswatter by a woman, while he screamed. [4]

It lasted about ninety seconds. The station could not stop it. Then it was gone.

The FCC investigated. The FBI was involved. No one was ever charged. No one was ever identified. [5] To this day, it remains one of the strangest unsolved crimes in the history of television.

There were two broadcasts that night. Everyone agreed on that.

The label said three.

Danny's uncle Ray had worked night maintenance at a TV transmitter in the 1980s. Danny brought the tape to his apartment because Ray still had a VCR, and because Ray was the only person Danny knew who might find it funny.

Ray did not find it funny.

He held the black sleeve in both hands like it was hot. He turned it over. On the back, in smaller writing, there was a note.

Only on a screen that is turned off. Never on one that is watching.

"What does that mean?" Danny said.

"It means don't play it," said Ray. Then, because he was seventy-one and lonely and had never once in his life walked away from a mystery, he played it.

He played it on an old television that was unplugged.

Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.