Snook - Disturbing Internet Rabbit Holes

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

follow and rate 5 stars! Thank you! :) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Have you ever clicked a video or opened a random link, just out of curiosity? And before you know it, hours have vanished? Yeah, same. I think we all have. But sometimes those rabbit holes don't just lead to quirky videos or obscure facts. Some lead somewhere darker, somewhere strange, unsettling, and sometimes flat-out disturbing. Today we're diving into some of the internet's creepiest, most bizarre corners. corners, corners where fascination quickly turns into fear. And I'm excited to get into it, but before we do, make sure to like and subscribe.
Starting point is 00:00:34 It seriously helps on the channel. And all right, without further ado, let's jump into some disturbing internet rabbit holes. A Vagrant Holiday. What would you do if a man walked up to you in public and just started filming? No explanation, no conversation, just standing there, silently recording you. Back in 2014, a YouTube channel known as surveillance cameraman posted videos of an individual going up to people and recording them. What? Chase you asked us first before you...
Starting point is 00:01:07 Oh, you seem confused. Yeah, you're not... We have this room and you just like charge it. Oh. These videos became incredibly popular, but also very controversial. The idea was to shed light on the fact that people are recorded every day by surveillance cameras everywhere, but only seemed to notice when it's right in their face. You were who?
Starting point is 00:01:34 Oh, I'm taking a video. Those who had an issue with it would voice their concerns on how it's invading their privacy and that they're being filmed without consent. You can see where this is going. Anytime anybody that he was filming would ask what he's doing, he'd simply just say, just taking a video. When asked why, he said, why not? And would remain silent for the entire remaining duration of the interaction
Starting point is 00:01:57 until something prompted him to leave. Remember the attitude and voice used in these videos. As mentioned earlier, these videos became incredibly popular and recovered by local news stations reporting on the issue. It was finally regarded as a social experiment and SCM eventually stopped posting for good. While his channel is still up to this day, there are no videos on it. Fast forward to December 2017. A channel on YouTube by the name of Vagrant Holiday uploaded eight different videos. These videos would feature this anonymous guy living as a vagrant.
Starting point is 00:02:33 Let's talk about forbidden island first. Most people clicked on it thinking it was a documentary about an island nobody was allowed to visit. I was expecting like a documentary about what little we know about this island, like a lemono video. Not this dude just saying, fuck it, I'll do it myself. The island in question is the McNeil Island, which houses a maximum security penitentiary for the worst criminals out there. He stayed on this island for a couple of days, exploring it at night. He would commentate everything live while risking a prison sentence by exploring the island for what seems to be nothing more than fun, explaining how there used to be families of guards working there,
Starting point is 00:03:11 living on the island before everyone has moved out. The houses remained abandoned, along with an entire school, in a whole other prison block. It's in this prison block that he says, Huh, just taking a video. This is a direct callback to SCM. The other videos featured on his channel are Riot's Holiday, where he simply walks around during the 2020 riots and films everything, more or less not giving a shit. Vagrant holiday, Japan, where he explores Japan without paying for any sort of accommodation, instead choosing to camp out in woods, and keeps costs even lower by only using public transport, hitchhiking, and eating plain simple meals. This theme of not paying for accommodation follows in several of his videos, where he usually
Starting point is 00:03:57 only eats baguettes and hummus or peanut butter sandwiches while camping out in woods near major cities. His crude humor and attitude ironically adds a lot of personality to each video, which is what viewers admire most about him. The same themes follow until vagrant holiday, train hopping, where he, well, train hops. He boards cargo trains and rides them out to wherever they're going, letting him see some crazy views for no cost at all. He does his best not to get caught while doing so, and even faces some close calls. While he's private and doesn't talk about specific personal topics,
Starting point is 00:04:32 he doesn't shy away from sharing a story or two, but he's also kind enough to share his belongings which he takes with him on every trip. Though 95% of people respect his privacy, he has a special message for the 5% who don't. And this is one of his YouTube descriptions. I'm done with videos. more will be posted here. Vagrant Holiday was a side project done purely for fun and not profit. No need to read further if you're saying, do not try to find or contact me for any reason. I owe nothing to anyone. I'm not your friend. I have no idea who you are. If you claim I've saved your life, no, I didn't. You don't need to know what I'm doing. It's not your business. If someone not posting to the internet on a regular basis is upsetting, or the most mysterious thing
Starting point is 00:05:21 you've experienced, I can't help you with your problem. And then he links a Wikipedia article to parasycial interaction, so I guess for people to cope with their parasocial relationships with him. And then he says, there's nowhere else I'll be posting to. Rumors surrounding him in this channel are likely made up by attention seekers. If it sounds dumb, it probably is. If it doesn't, you might be the one who's dumb. Go outside. P.S. To those asking if I'm dead, the answer is yes. funerals last week. You weren't invited. There are always people who want to find out who he really is, but they've gotten pretty
Starting point is 00:05:57 much nowhere in the search effort. Since he's no longer posting videos and has no other social media as mentioned during his bag tour, there's no real way of telling whether or not he's active anywhere else until someone finds it and makes the connection. Vagrant Holiday remains a mystery. Quite a fun one, though. Sad Satan. On June 25th, a YouTube channel,
Starting point is 00:06:20 In the obscure Horror Corner uploaded a four-part video series playing the game, Sad Satan. No commentary play-throughs of this terrifying and mysterious game. It seemed to just be the player walking through these dark, scary hallways. This is the best description of the game from an article which interviewed the channel owner. Walking forward, it's hard to make out what's waiting for you in the distance. The only thing you can hear is your footsteps, one after the other, acting as a reminder that something tangible exists within these shadows. The walking continues for a while, though the player in the video doesn't really seem to make any progress. It almost seems as if they are walking in place, but no. Eventually,
Starting point is 00:07:01 the player does get closer to the flickering light. This is where the strange muffled sounds a start. It almost sounds like a kid, gasping. It could be anything, though. The player turns back, walks for a little bit, then turns around again. Now there seems to be a different door made out of light in the distance. The maze is not static. It changes. The player moves towards the light, naturally, and the voices get more distorted. Stranger, the hallway changes too. The voices turn into a growl. The player simply keeps walking forward. Really, that's the only thing they can do. Eventually, the character finds themselves in the initial hallway once more, only this time, it's corrupted, unstable. A yellow line flashes on the ground every few seconds,
Starting point is 00:07:48 almost making it seem like the player is walking down the middle of a road. Eventually, the scenery changes on its own once again. Back to the black and white hallway. This idea has also turned volatile. The walls blur and shift and you can hear a man repeat an unintelligible phrase over and over again. Still, the player pushes forward, reaching the end of this hallway. This is like one of those nightmares where you feel like you're trapped and can't run away. This is just a game and it's giving me chills.
Starting point is 00:08:18 As the game progressed, however, things somehow felt even more out of place. There was no real aim. Things got eerily scarier as the game progressed, but there seemed to be no real end to the terror. Throughout the game, however, there were random flashes of images, while the player would walk through the corridors of Doom. On the surface, this simply just feels odd and creepy, but it gets so much worse. The channel owner had downloaded this game from a tour-hurted. hidden service, which is already a big red flag. He claimed that an anonymous subscriber sent
Starting point is 00:08:53 it to him through the Tor hidden service. The subscribers said that he found it from a dark web forum posted by a user only known as ZK. The game has no apparent goal other than to walk down the hallway and reach the end. There were no other characters other than these children on the wall who never moved. Eventually, in the game by the fourth video, uploaded by obscure horror corner, the children would follow the player causing contact damage. As the player, you can't do anything against this, meaning you will eventually die. But if you notice, there's a very disturbing and reoccurring theme here.
Starting point is 00:09:30 This image is a picture of Jimmy Savelle and Margaret Thatcher endorsing the NSPCC, or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which is incredibly ironic. Without going into much detail, While Jimmy Savile is a hypocrite for supporting this society, he's done some not-so-great things, to say the least, and even defended convicted offenders. And after his death, 10 different women spoke up about his disgusting actions, and what he did to them, with one of them being young.
Starting point is 00:10:01 And things go deeper. Obscure Horror Corner, or Jamie, would go on to say that he ended up deleting the game, after seeing a file it came with that freaked him out completely. It was just a bunch of text and gibberish, but was extremely. extremely eerie. Things just didn't seem right, and Jamie didn't in fact upload the whole uncut game played to YouTube. He also tracked the link for the game after finding that among these creepy pictures shown on YouTube, there was heavy gore and even cheese pizza. Sad Satan had inevitably found its way over to 4chan where a download link was posted. The game file contents, however,
Starting point is 00:10:36 were truly disturbing. Firstly, it contained destructive malware, but this would be the least of your worries, as it also contained pictures of mutilated corpses and more cheese pizza. What's fearful, however, is the fact that the actual game was slightly different. It had different content, meaning this was a clone. Now, whether someone sick decided to create a clone worse than the original or the original creator to decide to make a new version, nobody really knew, Reddit users managed to clean the game up of its malware and illegal content, posting a sanitized version on the R-slash-satshack.
Starting point is 00:11:14 Satan subreddit. The clone, which was uploaded to 4chan, is hypothesized to be created by a man named Gary Graves, who in 2017 was arrested in Texas for possession of cheese pizza. Whether this was some sick and twisted meta-commentary on abuse or something sick and twisted made for fun, nobody knows why sad Satan was made or what it was created for. You slash A858. A858, keeps the trend of unsolved mysteries going. Back in early 2011, a user on Reddit who went by the name, well, it's pretty long when reading it out, uh, here we go. U-slash A858, DE45F569 BC9. And so let's use A858 for short. This user began posting huge 64-bit strings of encoded submissions to his newly created subreddit.
Starting point is 00:12:16 Care to take a guess on what that's called? And yeah, his long-ass name of numbers and letters. Very creative. This user would constantly post these strings of text, which were supposedly encoded and would reveal things when decoded, and we'll get to what it revealed in a second. Most users at first glance thought it was a trollbot,
Starting point is 00:12:38 just set up to generate random strings of text and constantly post. But as for what these cryptic messages, were when decoded random messages, thanking Reddit when a user gifted them gold, and a very curious gif of Sarah Palin with the word Maverick. Whether this was a clue, it wasn't known. But this is just the beginning of the story. The real question, what was all of this even for? A CIA test, NSA, FBI? Well, in 2015, A858 was doing an AMA. or ask me anything. When asked what all of this was for,
Starting point is 00:13:18 the answer was simple but very frustrating. We cannot disclose the purpose. A858 will end when the purpose is disclosed or discovered. They also claim that one person had cracked the mystery, a woman from the UK decrypted a post, but only they noticed. Over time, things would turn up uneventfully until in 2016. There would be a new post on the solving A858 subreddit.
Starting point is 00:13:43 The A858 project has ended. Thank you for your efforts trying to solve the puzzle, puzzles, presented by the A858 project. The A858 project team members have been reassigned. There will be no further A858 project post by our team. We apologize that the information available to the public is not sufficient to solve all outstanding puzzles. Some information was missed and other remains undiscovered slash misunderstood. But because of the missed information, any further efforts on solving A858 will be in vain. And moderators on R-slash-solving underscore A-8-58 can confirm that U-S-Lash-TeamWMod is an A8-58 project team member.
Starting point is 00:14:29 We will not respond to any questions in the comments, nor by direct message. This account will not be monitored after 1,300 UTC Wednesday. And this was disappointing. The end had come, but people still wanted to know what all of this was for. What were they even trying to decode and decrypt? But at the same time, they appreciated the puzzle. As someone who spent years solving these and cracking the encryption and doing analysis alongside Azra, Plontas, Jihar, I've got to say I'm disappointed.
Starting point is 00:15:03 We put in serious work, late nights and long hours. It's frustrating that it's not come to anything. On the other hand, thanks for great puzzles, and an excuse to focus and learn more about cryptography and to better my knowledge. I've applied these skills as an engineer, and they've been useful. Plus, it's been fun. So long and thanks for all the fish. Later on, however, Ahmad, Jihad, Jihar, had revealed that they spoke to someone directly from
Starting point is 00:15:29 A858, and I read the following. Oh, I am A858. If you didn't notice, if you agree not to tell anyone that I contacted you directly, I can help you crack some of the codes that I've posted over the years. You cannot crack all of them. And after you announce to the world, if you want, that you crack some of them, I will be changing how the messages are encrypted. Anyway, I was wondering if you had heard anything from Mouan Dragon. He worked here, but then disappeared. He actually didn't know who A858 was. I knew he was a Redditor, so I told him about it in passing, pretending I knew nothing. Hopefully I won't get in
Starting point is 00:16:05 trouble for asking. I can't tell you how to decrypt all of the messages, and you don't want to anyway, but I can at least help you be a little internet famous if you want. Otherwise, I'll keep posting what I'm told to post. Hi, are you still there? Could you explain what's going on with this Doge coin message? Regards. K. I have some freedom to do things, and I get periodic directives. Signing up for the Doge Pot was a directive. I don't know what the point is. answering. Can we keep this channel open? So I guess our client just pulled the blog on the project. I was just told I was done with A858, which is fine with me. It's been a long three years. I guess they're going to change passwords on the accounts. I had access to the W accounts and A858 account. I have to
Starting point is 00:16:55 give them all of my source code too, but I asked if they were going to continue with whatever it was they were doing and my boss said he didn't know, but gave me a look like it was not on my fucking business. I'm not supposed to post anything anymore, and the contract terminates on Wednesday. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe they're done. I'm still under NDA for 50 years, 46 actually, although I don't really have any information that would be useful to anyone. Peace out. Thanks for telling me, so this will be our last contact? I guess you'd be in trouble if I had posted some of the information, right? The company who ran this activity had pulled the plug,
Starting point is 00:17:36 and the man behind operating everything couldn't share anything under an NDA for 50 years. So the soonest that there'll be any hope of officially hearing about what this is or what was encrypted will be in another 37 years. Webdriver Torso. It was 2014. September 23rd, somebody began uploading strange videos
Starting point is 00:18:00 that were basically PowerPoint presentations, but instead of somebody's brilliant pitch to increase shareholder value, it was a series of slides about a second long consisting of two rectangles, one red, one blue, in random shapes, sizes, and positions. This was laid on top of a solid white background and accompanied by a random computer-generated beep. Furthermore, the red rectangle always overlaps the blue when the two overlap. All of this baffled everyone back then. onlookers came up with weird theories, from alien communication to Cold War spies, anything
Starting point is 00:18:37 could have been behind this enigma. In the end, it turned out to be rather mundane. In an official statement from Google, they said this, we're never going to give you uploading that's slow or loses video quality, we're never going to let you down by playing YouTube and poor quality videos. That's why we're always running tests like web driver torso, a Rickroll. Peak comedy those days. Apparently, Google made this channel in 2013 to test YouTube. They would upload these random videos and then compare them to the local version to check for differences in quality. But the story isn't finished. There were a few unexplained uploads on the channel. For example, a video title, TMP RKRL 85. For the first half, it's the usual red and blue rectangles,
Starting point is 00:19:24 but in the second half, the red rectangle becomes a silhouette of Rick, Ashley, dancing. Like I said, peak comedy. Slightly more interesting and definitely less funny, there was another video title, 0-014, which was a video showing the Eiffel Tower. At the end, the camera flashes down to a laptop where a Facebook page, presumably web driver torsos, is visible. A few users on the aptly named RBI, standing for Reddit Bureau of Investigation, subreddit analyzed it. They found out that it was shot from the top floor of Hotel Pullman and was taken between 28th of May and 21st of July 2013, which they figured out from the strange colors on Eiffel Tower in the video that they were changed for France's South Africa celebration. Even more
Starting point is 00:20:14 strangely, Webdriver Torso with themselves commented on that video saying, Matei is highly intelligent. This was all anyone could find out about that video, however, and even Google didn't say anything more. The final unusual video was locked behind a paywall to France only and cost two euros, which was only payable by a French credit card. It was a clip of the cartoon Aquatine Hunger Force, a show about three fast food items personified. Google did not comment on this either. In fact, Google wouldn't have commented on anything at all if it wasn't for the work of an Italian blogger and internet detective known by the name of Sogeto, Ventuno. He found out that they were all linked to a network of accounts creatively called
Starting point is 00:21:00 YT upload test partner underscore torso. Ventuno, armed with this evidence, directly approached Google and then they confessed and gave the previously mentioned Rickroll in press release form. Markovian Paralach's Denigrate. In 1996, across various Usenet boards, hundreds of nonsensical messages were posted. They all had three things in common. It came from one user, Miss Susan Linduart. They had the same subject line, Markovian parallax denigrat, and they all consisted of a series of random words that made no sense. Here's an example from a Google Archive.
Starting point is 00:21:45 Jitterbugging McKinley, Abe, Break Newtonian, inferring Ka Update, Cohien Air, Collaborate, Rue, sports writing, Rococo, Invocate, Taosley, Shadflower, Debbie Sterling, pathogenes, Escriate, adventurous, Novo, ITT, most shareperson, Dwight Herzog, different pinpoint Dunk McKinley, pendant firelight, Uranus episodic medicine, Diddy, craggy, flogging, Varyak Brotherhood Web,
Starting point is 00:22:18 impromptu file, counterint's inheritance, Cohesion, Refrigerate, Morphine Napkin, Inland Janario, nameable yearbook Hark. And sorry for reading that all out, but it just kind of shows and outlines how ridiculous all of this was. And you might just dismiss this as spam, but usually even spam has some kind of message in it,
Starting point is 00:22:43 whether some advert for shady services, a scam designed to steal your money, or even political messages. It usually serves some purpose. But users couldn't think of an easy explanation for these random messages. A secret code was suspected, but to this day, nobody has been able to crack the cipher or find any hidden meaning. So let's look at the clues we have in the message.
Starting point is 00:23:08 First, the obvious one, the sender. Susan Linduar was an American journalist and used to be part of the Congress staff when she was charged with spying for a foreign country, specifically acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. She was arrested in 2004 and proclaimed that she did more to stop terrorism in this country than anybody else. According to the psychiatrist brought in by the court during the trial, she was suffering from a longstanding mental illness that included grandiose delusions. So what does a supposed anti-war spy have to do with these messages? According to her, absolutely nothing.
Starting point is 00:23:49 When contacted, she denied any involvement. What an anti-climatic ending. Another theory looked at the subject line and specifically the Markovian part. This could be a reference to the Markov chain, which is a statistical model, heavily used in many areas of science today. Google's page rank algorithm and several chatbots use this process, for example. Even more interestingly, Markovian is used to describe something that is related to a Markov process, according to the Oxford English dictionary. But it's still unclear how this mathematical model,
Starting point is 00:24:24 is related to this random gibberish posted on Usenet in the early days of the internet. The answer remains to be found, and nothing has been revealed by the poster, and nobody else could crack the cipher if there was even one in the first place. Unfavorable Semicircle Just a year after WebDriver Torso was discovered, another strange channel was found by the internet community called Unfavorable Semicircle. However, unfavorable Semicircle proved to be even stranger than web driver torso.
Starting point is 00:24:56 Starting on April 5, 2015, UFCS, started posting a huge volume of videos that usually had a few common features. One, they were five seconds long. Two, had a man saying a letter or number. Three, had a solid background with a single colored pixel in frame. Strangely, they all had the Sagittarius sign in front of all the video titles.
Starting point is 00:25:19 Now, you might think that this is just another testing channel by YouTube, but mysteriously, they terminated the channel in February of 2016, with no explanation. Users on Reddit noticed this channel and it quickly went viral, and a surprising amount of effort has been put into attempting to decode this. Several theories were quickly circulated. One was that it was some sort of outsider art which is by definition, art that has been created by an untrained person disconnected from conventional art. However, you can clearly see that the person behind me,
Starting point is 00:25:52 it had some technical knowledge as some of the videos were quite intricate, so dismissing it as just some insane guy would definitely just be wrong. And another theory which we discussed before for the other sites is that it is some sort of modern number station. Number stations are basically broadcast of numbers, which are sent by spies and meant to be received by intelligence agencies. You might know Morris Code, which was heavily used in World War I and II era, number stations to transmit data, to transfer classified military intelligence, there are several advantages to this theory. The fact that it is on a public platform that is free, almost never down, and widely available
Starting point is 00:26:32 across the globe, means that it can be easily assessed by anyone. Furthermore, any unsuspecting viewer couldn't understand anything and would see as just nonsense. One of the biggest breakthroughs was the idea of combining frames into composites. One of the more interesting ones is the composite. of the video titled Sagittarius Sign Lock. If you went even further and made 3D composites, which are made by plotting the colors of each pixel in a composite onto a 3D graph,
Starting point is 00:27:01 you can find something even more startling. Still, this is the clearest one, and nobody was sure whether this was the right direction in solving the mystery. After the channel was suspended, the mystery lay silent for a few years until June 1, 2022, when the Twitter account became active for the first time
Starting point is 00:27:19 since March 2019 and posted a series of tweets. Tweet 1. I think if an alien were to communicate with us, it would likely be UFCES, totally unhuman way of communication and thought. I'm not saying UFCS is an actual alien, L.O.L. Tweet number two. Got it basically right. Outsider art.
Starting point is 00:27:39 Some puzzles, some ARG, web driver inspired, a fine line between comprehensible and noise, stream of conscious, vague meanings, programming project and nothing. exciting meaningless poem unfound not sure can be nice work to all involved tweet number three this tweet included a YouTube link to the song the most beautiful day by Professor Click the lyrics of the song describe UFOs arriving on Earth and then tweet number four an image that appears to be a more complete version of the various composites we talked about earlier and then tweet number five it contains a link to a Wikipedia article for the Voyager Gold
Starting point is 00:28:19 record as well as an image of the Sagittarius sign lock composite and then tweet number six just underscore old thought with a bunch of weird composites all around and then onto number seven if a single structured slash voted list of questions is created somewhere platform of your choosing I will answer some of the top questions can't answer everything we'll start answering one week from today we'll answer here and in short this was just an art project designed to function around stream of conscious in the words of the creator. And I could have read the entire thing, but that would have been 40 minutes of reading all the answers.
Starting point is 00:29:00 But in short, like I said, it was a function around stream of consciousness. Also, you may have been drawing parallels from WebDriver Torso while watching, and in fact, the author actually thought of this channel name inspired by that one. The creator was watching from the start, apparently, from the very first Reddit post, and was even lurking on the Discord. The author wanted to see if people will watch something so strange and confusing and wanted to fill the gap of web driver torso. As it evolved, it became the main goal. Max Headroom Broadcast Intrusion.
Starting point is 00:29:32 Max Hedroom was a pretty popular TV character thought of in the early 80s. Channel 4 was hosting a music video program and needed a graphic to play before and after these music videos. They needed something that appealed to the younger generation and thought of various different ways in which they could. could get the message across while not coming across as cringe or boring. They decided to make a play on irony and set on creating a host that appeared to be a conservative man in a simple student tie, tripping over himself in an attempt appealing to the youth but ultimately failing. The initial concept at hand was to create a computer-generated host.
Starting point is 00:30:09 With it being the 80s, this was virtually impossible. They settled for the next best thing, making it look computer-generated. So after many pitches and a lot of characters, design, they casted Matt Fruer, making him look like a computer-generated TV host. His personality was tailored as such, and he had a couple of key standout features. He'd be in a shiny dark suit with Rayban Wayfares, and he'd be in a front of a background which was computer-generated. This TV personality became insanely popular until November 22nd, 1987.
Starting point is 00:30:43 Television broadcasting back then was completely analog, while it was very, very difficult to hijack these networks, it was possible with the right skill set. There were two separate interruptions in the broadcast that night. Both of the following incidents took place in Chicago. WGN TV was the first victim of this hijacking. At 9.14 p.m., the screen went black from what would have been a normal sports segment that night. 15 seconds passed. Then a different broadcast started playing. It was a person wearing a maxed room mask with sunglasses, with the background being a metal panel that was rotating back and forth. This broadcast was weak. The audio was staticky and garbled. Nobody could understand it. After about 30 seconds, engineers at WGN changed their transmission's frequency so that there was no
Starting point is 00:31:30 transmission being sent across the frequency abruptly stopping the hijack. That definitely wasn't the case for the second intrusion, which lasted three times longer on WTTW. This one was a lot smoother and you could hear audio. Now whether that's a good thing, why don't you guys be the judge of that? That is the only way to learn. I'll get you a hot drink, man. I've seen some dry clothing. He does it? He's a pretty nerd.
Starting point is 00:31:58 The fact is that bad and chest was not, oh. Jesus. The fact that's true. Yeah. The way. Your love is raining. Wow, we're all the greatest world newspaper nerds.
Starting point is 00:32:58 It's weird the other one. But it's nerdy. Now, this video poses a lot of questions, which makes it tough to even begin asking them. But the most important being, who was this? Why did they do this? While WGN TV managed to take it down, WTTW described themselves as helpless and couldn't stop the broadcast. For whatever reason, I guess turning the transatlantic.
Starting point is 00:33:45 transmitter off wasn't an option. They were stressed out as this fake Max Hedroom started mooning the viewers, but thankfully, the broadcast ended. There was a massive investigation into who did this, but the culprits were never found. How they did this, though? That's a question which can be answered much more easily. They managed to send a microwave transmission much more powerful than the one the station was sending, basically overriding the station's transmission, triggering something called a capture effect. While this sounds simple in theory, it requires a lot of technical knowledge
Starting point is 00:34:19 and expertise. More than that, they need a transmitter more powerful than an entire TV station. People speculated it was an employee or former employee responsible for these pranks, but the culprit was never found. Five years later, the statute of limitations had expired, meaning even if they found the culprit,
Starting point is 00:34:40 it would be too late to take any action on them. And to this day, nobody knows who was behind this hijacking. And all right, guys, that wraps up some disturbing internet rabbit holes. This is a new series for me. So comment down below if you'd like to see more installments in this series in the future. If you enjoyed this video, what you didn't like, what you did like, all feedback is very, very welcome. I appreciate it all. I read every single comment.
Starting point is 00:35:08 So make sure you comment down below. Did you enjoy this video? Did you not? What was your favorite case? What was your least favorite case? What would you like to see in the future? Thank you so much for watching the end of the video. That means a lot.
Starting point is 00:35:18 That's so awesome of you. And please like and subscribe if you made it to the end of the video. That means you like the video enough to watch all the way through. So that means you'll like the channel. And if you enjoy this video, I'm sure you'll like other videos on my channel. So, you know, check out some other videos. I have stories. I have more users.
Starting point is 00:35:33 I have some other weird rabbit holes and dark web mystery stuff. I'm sure you'll like it all. So thank you so much for watching. I appreciate you. You're the best. And this was Snook. And I'll see you next time. Bye.
Starting point is 00:35:45 Bye.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.