The Max Headroom Incident

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One Sunday night in November 1987, something very odd happened in the middle of the WGN nine o’clock news in Chicago. Sportscaster Dan Roan had been talking about the Chicago Bears, when the screen suddenly went black. Then a person appeared, dancing back and forth in front of a moving striped background, and wearing a mask. The mask was the face of a fictional character from 1985 named Max Headroom, who was supposed to be the world’s first computer generated TV host. He supposedly came from our “not so distant future”—a future where the world is run by TV executives. The interruption lasted about 30 seconds. And then, two hours later it happened again on a different channel—WTTW—during a…