Citation Needed - Broadcast signal intrusion
Episode Date: October 8, 2025A broadcast signal intrusion is the hijacking of broadcast signals of radio, television stations, cable television broadcast feeds or satellite signals without permission or licence. Hijacking inciden...ts have involved local TV and radio stations as well as cable and national networks.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to citation needed.
The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia,
and pretend we're experts.
Because this is the internet.
That's how it works now.
I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be calling the board this evening,
but I'll need the cues to my blues.
First up, the bars and tones to my 10 count, Noah and Heath.
All right, if anything, I'm the tone.
Heath is obviously the bars.
All right, I'm going with the bars.
But just in general, waking up on the couch to that long beep and the color bars,
that made our generation what it is.
It was terrifying.
Middle of the night, and it's just dollars and cute.
They've got to go upstairs.
And of course.
There's a man who always knows you're talking to him when you say Q talent.
Cecil, something Italian.
Yeah, I know it's my time to hold the cue card straight at that point.
Yeah, right, right.
Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.
Patrons, without your money, we'd be lost and adrift among the podcast signal.
But your dollars guide us back like a lighthouse in the storm.
And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around until the end of the show.
And with that out of the way, tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event.
what we'll be talking about today.
We're finally going to get some fucking use
out of concept. We've said that the whole time.
I don't think we've ever done a concept before.
It's like four of them. Yeah.
You know, television broadcast signal intrusions
today.
And Cecil, you read
the rundown. You're ready to take us to
the airwaves? I'm ready to wiggle this antenna
until it finds the right spot, Eli.
You tease.
So tell us, Cecil, what
are television broadcast
signal intrusion? Love those ravities.
years, right? Broadcast signal intrusions are rare
quick moments when someone manages to hack a television
or radio broadcast, breaking through the airwaves with a message
that was never meant to be there. Most last only a few minutes, some
only a few seconds, but they genuinely freak the fuck out
of anyone watching. In fact, I was witness to one of these
intrusions, pin in that for later. Yes, pin in that for later.
1980s and 70s, a handful of incidents stood out.
In fact, these are the three that I found on Wikipedia, so I'm actually going to use those.
So the dick on a Zoom call before it was cool.
I keep trying to tell you, Eli, it's still not cool, okay?
That's pretty cool.
I'd prefer if you were a cat, man.
Or your dick was a cat man?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It does say, what?
It's not supposed to say that.
that. You're very sick.
So, Grandpa Cecil, what was traditional broadcast television, you may ask?
Well, back before streaming, we had a bunch of airwave channels.
He deleted my part where I said that.
Back before streaming, we had a bunch of airwave channels.
A bunch of speak for yourself, City Boy. We had two and a half.
They would broadcast these channels via satellite.
to either your cable company or your local station,
and then you would tune in using a cable box
or just the antenna on the back of your television.
There were the common stations that showed programs across the nation
transmitted through local broadcasters.
These were ABC, NBC, CBS.
Later, more stations joined the lineup,
and you could also tune in your local PBS channels.
So if someone cuts into the broadcast back then,
there would be no resetting the signal or reloading the app.
You just have to be subjected to some weird shit for a few minutes
until someone at the networks took back the signal from the intruder.
Oh, man, and that was the dream, right?
The, like, signal hacking fantasy.
You get to give your big speech.
That might just be you, Big Dog.
What?
No.
No, you know, some of us became podcasters.
I get it.
Yeah, the John Gault thing.
I was, I used to like that book.
That's who I think of when I think of good, big speeches.
Right.
there was one other way for people to get a TV signal.
They could own their own satellite dish.
See, back then there was cable,
and then you could pay extra to your cable company
for premium channels like HBO or Showtime.
Hey, see, so that's still the case.
How far in the future are you casting this line?
Hold on, you interrupted me before I say,
but a group of mostly engineers
started sharing how to create
and maintain these satellite dishes,
and then you could get a lot of these channels,
even the ones the cable companies made you pay for for free.
This wasn't anything illegal like fake chips in a direct TV box.
These were just regular people with enough ingenuity
to grab signals from the air and not pay the man.
Okay, that one friend's dad who had the dish in everybody's town,
I don't know if you guys had, I had one of these and he was so fucking proud
of his top secret dish.
It was like a spy thing and you had to do this whole thing.
I sign an NDA to go see his fucking, come on.
So, okay, so back then, if you had, like, the full-sized dish, though, pre-direct TV,
you had to, like, point it at the correct satellites.
Like, we didn't have that, we know this geosynchronous shit you guys have today, right?
And we had these little black market charts where you would have to adjust the azimuth
and the elevation.
Like, literally had to have a fucking compass at was it.
Like, we worked for our free porn back then, damn it.
Well, in the mid-1980s, the companies,
that were transmitting these premium stations,
they decided to start scrambling these signals.
The satellite owners could then buy more descrambling equipment
and also start paying a monthly fee for stations like HBO,
or they could slam their face right up against the tube TV
and hope to look through the matrix long enough to catch a nipple on occasion.
I got a couple.
There's like that one second where everything's upside down,
but you're like, that's a real picture, and then it disappears.
Yeah, it's like,
B.S. Porn. I haven't felt that good since. Three to one contact. Right? Really think about how
hopeful you were when the on and the boobs. And now think about now. It's not even close.
It's not close. Hey, guys, I'm violently suicidal. Give me one second. Often these fees for the satellite
owners were more than the cable company charged for the same service. Even with these satellite
owners actually owning all the equipment to get the channel in the first place.
To give you an idea of these prices, HBO was charging satellite dish owners 1295 a month in
1986, which is about 37 bucks per month in today's dollars.
Those people also had to fork over 395 bucks for a scrambler, which comes to about
$1,150 today.
Yeah, but the money my parents would have saved on glasses if I hadn't been trying to squint watch
Red Shoe Diaries for my entire teen years.
Well worth it, my friends.
Well worth it.
But the audio wasn't scrambled.
It felt like an upcharge for having a bad imagination.
Okay.
One reseller of satellite dishes found that this pretty much killed his business.
People bought these things to get around monthly fees, not pay more for the privilege
of having monthly fees.
So this man, John McDougal, decided to write some protest letters to legislators and spent
some of his own money trying to raise awareness
for this cause. This didn't change
anything, though, and he was forced to cut costs
on his own business, and then eventually get
a part-time job at Central
Florida Teleport Uplink
Station, which uplinked services
to satellites.
These new measures are making stuff harder to
steal. Who do I write to about
that? Is it a senator?
On April
26, 1986,
his co-worker left for the night.
His job was to uplink the
movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure to People's Choice Network on pay-per-view.
After the movie ended...
Wait, that was on pay-per-view?
People were paying for people.
Doing God's work right down.
In 1986, yes.
Oh, yeah, baby.
After the movie ended, he logged off and decided to make a color bar message.
This was the typical color bar that you see when his station stopped for the evening,
but he put some words on it, and the message read...
The source of my trauma.
Good evening.
Evening HBO from Captain Midnight, 1295 a month, question mark, no way, exclamation point.
Showtime, movie channel, beware.
He pointed that back at the dish and into its storage position, and he pointed it at the satellite that carried HBO.
He then transmitted that message to all HBO customers for four and a half minutes,
interrupting the Falcon and the Snowman.
How dare?
It wound up showing to the.
eastern half of the United States, which is about 14.6 million subscribers to HBO.
Okay, that's such a confusing little manifesto.
If I'm watching HBO at this point, I'm happily paying more than 1295 a month to make sure
I can keep following the very inept manifesto guy.
I don't think he's sabotaging the station the way he thinks he is.
Well, the owner of that satellite noticed the jamming, and Wikipedia uses this language.
Quote, Hughes Communications, owner of the Galaxy One satellite,
immediately noticed the jamming and threatened to shut down HBO's satellite signal
or alterless satellites course with executives believing the hacker was a domestic terrorist, end quote.
Then the HBO Tech and McDougal had a wattage duel,
each pumping up the power of their signal to push the other signal out.
It probably made exactly that sound.
after a couple minutes
McDougal relented
and packed up his shit
and just went home
for the night
calls the other guy
hey were you making a
me minima
noise of your mouth
too
you weren't
okay good
good
I love the idea
of like some tech
right there
Ian trying to explain
to Mr. Hughes
why they can't
just steer the satellite
a little to the left
why doesn't it work
what do you mean
reset it
so
why do you have to put the message
the manifesto thing
into the color bars.
Like he thought people would
like not understand it
outside of the format
of the color bars.
This made national news.
The network was pissed
and when corporate overlords
are mad about something,
they do what they always do.
They got the government involved.
And then the FCC said
that the television hacker
would be prosecuted.
They in turn got the justice department
involved and they started
narrowing down the satellites
that could actually do this.
They cut it down from 2,000 to 580
by narrowing down
of particular uplake satellites
and then they track the font
and the other characteristics
cutting that number down to 12.
They should have done the
you should have done the fucking magazine cutout thing.
Jesus, fucking amateur.
Are there certain fonts
that are like indigenous
to central Florida or something?
Fonds have like they have an accent.
You can tell the fonts.
Interesting.
Then they visited these stations.
From camp damn man, man.
Then they visited these stations.
to investigate and finally got a tip
that it was McDougal. He was
bragging about jamming the signal at a
pay phone and a rest area in your
Gainesville and someone wrote his
license plate down. Hey, that's
a weird phone call to make
in your life that you like stopped
to make at a pay phone. Sorry.
Sorry. Cheryl, I just can't wait
to get home to tell you this. Guess what I did
on. I've endangered our livelihoods.
You have the rest area in Gainesville again?
Yeah, you should get out of there.
I'm making hard-eye contact.
Hang up right now. Hang-up right now. Hang-up right now. He has a notepad. Why does he have a notepad?
It's crazy how much like a notepad he has.
The government brought charges that could fine him $100,000 and have to spend a year in prison,
so he pled guilty to illegally operating a satellite uplinked transmitter.
And then he had to pay $5,000 fine and spend a year on probation.
I feel like his probation officer was just way out of his league with the questions
he would have to ask at this point.
It doesn't understand any of it.
He's just reading this.
Have you,
Hey,
done any satellite?
It's your job.
Okay.
Well,
are you checking in from a rest area near Gans?
Don't smoke hot.
McDougal was either regarded by the public as a folk hero or a terrorist.
The House of Representatives,
communication subcommittee decided that Congress should pass a law making hijacking a satellite
a felony and then made sure that things were in place to track what satellites transmitted
what signal in the future so they wouldn't have to do so much investigation and only have
anonymous tips off the case wiki notes that the takeover and the press did not motivate
HBO to change their pricing structure huh yeah be fair neither did not having a good show since the
early seasons of Game of Thrones, but
I've got some angry
emails to answer, so let's take a quick break for
some apropos of nothing.
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I brought mine to college.
But that's not all.
For just $14.99 a month, you'll get access to Scramble Hub.
With all the HBO and SkinnaMax late night hits you remember,
exactly as you remember them.
Was that a boob?
Who knows?
But you can pretend it was.
Woods porn.
Because whatever the kids are doing these days is confusing and scary.
Hey, Denny, you guys have Riz?
Is it?
I don't think so, no.
I don't know what day. Can we buy it? What it? What do you? I don't. I don't think so.
Oh, man. Feels important. Your magazine smells like a mushroom.
Notebooks? Got them. Pencils.
yeah they have like big ones now it's crazy big pencils yeah they're supposed to help them write better i guess
they don't start with the number twos and don't forget you raycon jesus what is that thing
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i guess um but randy why would you need rancons for back to school oh oh i thought you said back
to cool in which case the racon classic earbuds would be a must
Well, why's that?
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Plus, they come in a cool mint flavor that'll never cramp your stop.
But what about battery life, Randy, the raw dog?
They've got up to 32 hours of battery life,
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an awareness mode when I'm out walking the dog.
Wait, you want a dog?
Of course I do.
Dogs are great.
That's confusing.
But Randy, have you actually tried these things?
I have.
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All right, Randy. Thanks.
I still don't understand why he's shaved, though.
Why is it?
Because he's raw, Cecil.
Right, got it.
No, Connie.
Stop it.
And we're back.
And we're back.
Off, HBO was totally
poned by a hacktivist badass
who was mad
his illegal thing didn't work anymore.
Who's our next leet to
skin the noob, Cecil?
Now, in the other incidents that I found
the investigations didn't yield any
suspects.
Oh shit.
So, yeah.
It's not getting crazy.
Drip.
This next trip.
That's a new one I learned.
This next one takes place.
in 1977 in southern England.
The transmission occurred at 5.10 p.m. on Saturday, November 26th, independent television
news was doing an evening report on clashes in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe.
There was a buzz that came over the signal, and then the speakers started to talk in a distorted
voice for about six minutes, and they read this statement in part. I didn't include the whole thing,
but part of it. Quote, this is the voice of Rillin, representative of the Ashtar
galactic command speaking to you for many years you have seen us as lights in the skies we speak to you now in
peace and wisdom as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this your planet earth
we come to warn you of the destiny of your race and the world so that you may communicate
to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid this disaster which threatens your
world and the beings on our worlds around you.
This is in order so that you may share in a great awakening as the planet passes into a new age
of Aquarius, end quote.
Okay, I feel like there was an argument in the writer's room with these like genius aliens
or whatever being like, okay, how do we start?
I'm going to do, oh, hello today.
This is Rilat.
No, that's stupid saying.
I'm saying my name.
We have wisdom.
I don't know.
Why speaking to you?
Obviously, you're speaking to me.
It's also, it's, it's off, it's crazy to me how often the aliens brave the inner galactic void to offer fucking banalities, right?
You know, I should pause here to let you know.
We put a lot of work into this and we're just telling them like vaguely over like the course of a couple minutes, something they should just be nice.
Live, laugh, love.
Fuck.
Are we still open to if you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be neat.
I like that one better than this.
Thank you.
I like, can we go back to that?
Thank you, Markler.
I'm Rylan.
What?
Jesus.
You're Markler.
You didn't introduce yourself at the beginning.
How would you know?
I'm John Tramota from the movie
Zoot Fish.
Hey, podcast, sister.
I'm sorry, me and he don't know for the rest of the show.
Just fucking crack it up in my sword.
So I should pause here to let you know that the name
Ashtar isn't chosen out of a hat for this prank because it sounds spacey.
This was the name that channelers used since the 1950s when they channeled space aliens.
In fact, this eventually became a spiritualist religion and they predicted the apocalypse.
So maybe someone puts on their citation needed watch.
this Ashtar thing.
Anyway, I'm just continuing
with the quote here.
Quote,
The new age
can be a time of great peace
and evolution
for your race,
but only if your rulers
are made aware
of the evil forces
that can overshadow
their judgments.
Be still now and listen
or your chance may not come again.
Guys,
did we just get
one, two, three
eyes on meed by aliens?
You did.
You got some of the sit down
and be quiet.
Here's the quote,
all your weapons,
of evil must be removed.
The time for conflict is now
passed and the race of
which you are part of may
proceed to the higher stages
of its evolution if you show
yourselves worthy to this. That's
really awkwardly worded.
Continuing the quote, you have but a short
time to learn to live together
in peace and goodwill.
They're pretty sure what we were missing for
world peace was a time limit everybody.
So, okay. Wait,
so how did the fucking purpose
perpetrators see this going right so he figured the fucking USSR would be like well you know some
alien on british television did seem pretty sincere about giving up our moot so uh what the fuck
so he goes on for a bit about being good and then he issues this warning quote be aware also
that there are many false profits and guides at present operating on your world they will suck your
energy from you, the energy
you call money, and put it
to evil ends, giving you
worthless dross in return.
And they'll charge you $12.99
a month for it, even after you buy
a fucking disgruntleter. Can you believe this
shit? Continue to God.
Your inner divine self will
protect you from this. You must learn
to be sensitive to the voice within
that can tell you what is
truth and what is confusion,
chaos and untruth.
Learn to listen to the voice,
of truth, which is within you, and you will lead yourselves onto the path of evolution.
Don't be fooled by weird speeches about false prophets. The boomy voice speech givers are probably
lying. Trust your gut. This doesn't get, this is a real one. This is not this one. And this
one. Starts toasting your gut now. That John Travolta movie was cool. So good. No, it wasn't. She sucked
his dick while he was hacking. It was a little. It was that.
the best test.
He's such a good hacker.
They close with, quote,
we here at Ashtar Galactic Command.
Thank you for your attention.
We are now leaving the planes of your existence.
May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth
of the cosmos, end quote.
Love, Ashtar.
Love?
Are we saying love?
Should I do a sign off with?
Okay, whatever. By wisdom. The thing we said, I don't know. Check out that movie.
Okay. Look, I'm not saying that wasn't aliens. I'm saying if they were, based on their message, I'd still want us to have ignored them.
The most boring-ass hippie fucking aliens. Look, if you want me to listen to that kind of shit, you have to give me drugs first, okay?
So the prankster took control of a transmitter near the main transmitter, sent the signal through their own equipment, and that's how the broad
cast was sent. The people investigating it thought because of their own configuration of these
transmitters, a relatively low power signal sent in the right way could do the trick. It would
require a lot of technical know-how, but it could be done pretty easily. They never caught
anyone, and no one ever came forward to claim the hoax. It was Ashtar, Cecil. He just told
it. He just said it. It's kind of hard to catch them, though, after they leave this plane of
existence, right? Like that, we look under this Calabiao manifold over here. No, it doesn't make any
fucking sense. It's too small. Couldn't look under that. Immediately after the broadcast, there
was a public uproar. People started calling a television station after the signal, worried there was
an alien asking us to be nice to each other. The next day, the newspapers announced the
signal takeover in the news organizations around the world spread the story. Personally, I'd have
given it a couple of days to test the sort of watchman hypothesis, right?
Oh, what do you guys think?
We're all going to be afraid of the giant octo?
No, no, okay.
It was a scam.
I also want to say this is something that some people took at vase value, too.
There was a, they thought that there was an actual alien that came to broadcast this signal
on a small station in southern England during the evening news on a Saturday so that mankind
could be nice to each other and gain a higher stage of evolution.
One editor of a newspaper in Oregon said, quote,
Nobody seemed to consider that Astoran, they misspelled it, may have been for real,
or that he may have made a great deal of sense, and quote.
Hey, I want to be mean to that editor.
And, like, I realize I won't be doing transcendent evolution or whatever.
I see the irony in this, but like, fuck that, it's so stupid.
No, yeah, no, look, I put away my weapons of evil.
Now I get to make fun of the motherfucker.
That was the whole list, wasn't it?
It was the whole list.
Only imperative I saw.
It was it.
So this last signal intrusion happened in Chicago, and I,
caught it live on the air.
Oh, explosions, broadcast hacks,
whatever's happening to Tom.
What haven't you seen, season?
I don't want to see what's happening to Tom, though.
The other ones I did, yeah.
Nobody does.
On November 22nd, 1987, a prankster
hijacked two signals in two different local stations
about two hours apart.
The first intrusion happened on WGN
during the 9 p.m. news.
The Bears had beaten the line,
30 to 10 and Dan Rohn was giving the recap. Okay, is it just like a fucking Bears fan to bring
up a fucking 38-year-old victory? The Belize won yesterday. We haven't had a recent one. No,
let me have my 30 to 10 victory. A Jax fan would never live in the past. Then, for 30 seconds,
the picture was replaced with a loud buzzing sound and terrible room tone. On the screen was a person
in a Max Hadroom mask. Now, Max Headroom.
was a computer-generated character
that was popular at the time.
Actually, I'm so sorry to 80s nerd
to this TV. But Max Hegham was a real guy
made up to look like a computer-generated guy
because CGI was so fucking bad. You couldn't
actually make a dude with it yet. Yeah.
Point take it, absolutely true.
You're absolutely right. I will yield to your
80s nerd knowledge. The background
of this picture was a spinning piece
of corrugated metal meant to
simulate the very basic line
geometrical patterns that the actual
character had in their videos.
The person in the mask didn't say anything.
Just sort of bobbed back and forth for a few seconds,
picture cut to black, and then back to the news.
And then a stunned reporter said,
well, if you're wondering what happened, so am I.
And then Dan joked that the computer running the news took off and went wild.
Yeah, someone spent way more time on the how than they did on the one.
Sure did.
What do you mean?
You froze, man.
I was like, what?
Have you guys?
Spoilers, by the way, for what Cecil's about to tell us.
So about two hours later on a different channel, this time it was our PBS affiliate, WTTW.
There was another signal intrusion.
So this last one I actually saw live on the air.
It was a school night, but every Sunday night, my dad let me stay up to watch Doctor Who with him.
And Dr. Hu ran from, I think, it was like 1030 to midnight.
Whoa.
It was a big deal.
Yeah, it was a big deal for a middle school kid.
Yeah, it was huge.
So we're watching Dr. Who, and then the signal fades, and a guy in a max headroom mask
starts talking in a really distorted voice.
It's hard to understand.
I'll get to what he says later, because without subtitles, it's actually really tough
to make out.
Anyway, this guy has like a whole prop comic routine he goes through that ends with him
getting his bare aspect with a fly swatter.
And then I remember asking my dad, it was like, what the hell was that?
And he said, and this is a.
quote quote
I don't think it was
fucking doctor who
and quote
the bear ass comes out
at the same time
you're both like
hey you're doing a weird
prank
I don't
I'm not going to make eye contact
but you're doing a weird
prank
I know I kind of blew
the first one
but trust me
when I get my
butt hold tonight
on PBS
people
are going to be so funny
amazing
so I'm actually
going to quote from the wiki here, the actual description, because they actually do a really
job, it's pretty concise. So, quote, the mass figure spent the next minute or so, making a
quick series of brief and seemingly unrelated comments and cultural references interspersed with
excited noises and exclamations. He was first heard to make a comment about nerds, and then he called
the WGN sportscaster Chuck Swersky, a frickin liberal, held up a can of Pepsi while
referencing the Catch the Wave slogan from a recent ad campaign for
Coca-Cola featuring the real Max Headroom.
Bobbing and weaving.
Held a middle finger near the camera inside what appeared to be a hollowed-out
dildo.
Okay, I'm trying to track.
The ideology is getting really muddled.
Like, I'm not going to get any better.
After some random moaning, the mass figure sang the phrase,
Your Love is Fading,
hummed part of this theme song from the 1959
animated series Clutch Cargo
and said, I still see the
X, which is a reference to the last
episode of that show. He also
feigned defecation
complaining of his piles.
Fained? Commit to the bit.
I know. You're going to show your ass.
You might as well shit out of it too, right?
He claimed that he made a giant
masterpiece for all the
greatest world newspaper nerds. Now
WGN, their call
letters stand for world's greatest
newspaper. So they suspect that's a reference to that.
and he put on a knitted glove on one hand while commenting that it was dirty and his brother had the other one.
What is happening? I don't know. Do you need to watch it? It's on Wikipedia. It's crazy. After a crude jump cut, the main figure appeared mostly off screen to the left with his partially exposed buttocks visible from the side with a female figure wearing a French maid costume, which stirred something inside my young mind, by the way. When they appear to be in a mask appearing from the right edge of the frame,
At some point, it was like, all right, the one knitted glove thing is going badly.
We got to just cut to our awesome ending on.
Unroll tape on the spanking.
Go to the spanking.
Cut the spanking camp.
So he's, while he's leading over, the unworn max headroom mask is briefly held in view.
And then the voice cried out, oh no, they're coming for me.
I'll make it stop.
And then the female in the French made outfit started spanking Max with a fly swatter.
the image faded to static
and the viewers were returned to Doctor Who
broadcast after that total interruption
of about 90 seconds, end quote.
Okay, Doctor Who needs to make an episode
that intersects with this moment
in the universe.
There you know.
I don't want this to sound mean,
but sometimes when we do like live shows,
we do meet and greets afterwards
or during or something.
And someone has very clearly planned a bit,
but I'm a human being
and not the scripted podcast character they expect.
this moment is what happens 100% of the time
what's up knuckle fucker
I brought you some shit tits to suck on
and I'm like that's my wife and they're like
you're doing a jump cut here and what are you doing
okay with a fly swatter
he's doing his asses out
I like the French made outfit though it looks good on you
and we're back did you say and we're back
and then you spanked your own
Okay.
So the first signal...
Solfish, right?
Yeah, that was a good movie.
The first signal at WGN was counteracted
by engineers on staff
within a few seconds.
They changed the frequency
of the signal and locked out the hacker.
The WTTW one, though,
happened after the engineers on duty
left for the night at the Sears Tower.
So there was no one there to stop it
and we all got to see this uninterrupted bit.
No one ever claimed responsibility
for this hack, even after the statute of limitations
had reached five years.
after it happened. People suspect
it was a disgruntled WGN employee
or a former employee because of the references
to WGN. It's also possible that it could
have been carried out by the local Chicago
hacker community.
And if you had to summarize what you learned in one
sentence, Cecil, what would it be?
You're going to hijack a television signal, maybe
write a set list?
That's right, right? There you go.
Script it and it'll sound like improv.
And are you ready for the quiz?
Podcast it out.
Dude is hanging out, spanking, whatever.
Tune it in. Go for it.
All right.
First question is, the obvious one.
Why did the hacker do just stare at the camera like a fucking idiot the first time of it?
A, he was a fucking idiot.
Came by it naturally.
I think it's A so far.
B, he couldn't see the on-air light because he was wearing a mask.
That's probably, yeah, sure.
C, it was the first instance of the R-We-on moment that starts every live stream.
100%.
That's what it was.
or D, the alternative was whatever the fuck happened the second time around,
and he knew that, right?
He knew it was either that or silence.
Yeah.
I, you know, I feel like all of them are great, but definitely A.
If you watch it, it's fucking A.
Come on, man.
It's definitely, yeah.
All right, Cecil.
What's the name of our signal hacking heist movie?
A, Oceans 8 bit.
B, computer tower heist.
C, the Italian
Fob
Okay, I get that
I get that one
Or D
Now you TV
Jesus
Christ
Dude
I mean
It makes no sense
And also like
Nobody remembers that movie
Unless they were like the fucking
The magician
consultant
I'm gonna go with
I'm gonna go with B
for how he spelled
Heist
Thank you
Swordfish with a
He spelled
Listener
He spelled he spelt he seet
Keith
I want you to know
From the minute
We started making
Swordfish jokes
My nose bled
With the effort
Of me trying to come up
With a swordfish
Fun
To add on to that
Toad fish with a pH
Come on
All right
You good
Your nose okay
Bam
He popped
Okay
Cecil
I got one more for you
All right. So aside from the very mysterious guy getting spanked with a fly swatter during Doctor Who.
What's the best conspiracy program on PBS? A. DeGrassey Noll.
Fantastic. That's so amazing.
You only need to what it's a digassy knoll.
I spent a lot of time working with like a porn version of PBS stuff, but it was all very upsetting what I came up with.
I bet it was.
I bet it was.
You definitely don't.
The certain world should never mix Heath to grassy knoll.
There you go.
The magic school bussy is part of it.
There it is.
They get jizzed on in an episode.
Come on now.
They do.
That's why Heath wins.
All right.
Let's hear from Eli next week.
All right.
Well, for Noah, Tom, Cecil, and Heath.
I'm Eli Bosnick.
Thank you for hanging out with us today.
We'll be back next week.
And by then, I,
will be an expert on something else.
Between now and then,
you can listen to our other podcasts.
Sometimes Tom shows up for those ones.
Jesus.
And if you'd like to help keep this show going,
you can make a per-episode donation
at patreon.com slash citation pod
or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.
And if you'd like to get in touch with us,
check out past episodes, connect with us on social media,
or check the show notes.
Be sure to check out citationpod.com.
Thank you.