Description
In April 1986, something strange happened to millions of television screens.
During a late-night broadcast on HBO, the movie suddenly disappeared and a block of text appeared over the signal. It wasn’t a technical error and it wasn’t part of the program.
Someone had taken control of the broadcast.
For a few minutes, one of America’s biggest television networks had been hijacked by a message from someone calling himself Captain Midnight.
The person behind the signal intrusion wasn’t a spy, a government, or a criminal organization. It was a satellite engineer protesting the rising cost of scrambled satellite television signals.
But the incident exposed something surprising about the technology of the time: the systems that delivered national television broadcasts were powerful… but not invulnerable.
In this episode of Last Seen Online, we explore the strange night when one person briefly interrupted a national broadcast, how the hijack actually worked, and what it revealed about the early era of satellite television.
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