Post by auntym on Sept 24, 2018 14:20:42 GMT -6
www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/ghost-in-a-box-the-haunting-history-of-television-broadcast-intrusions/
Ghost in a Box: The Haunting History of Television Broadcast Intrusions
by Michael Grasso / www.dailygrail.com/author/mg7810/
Tuesday, November 28th
Almost as soon as the television entered the American home, forever changing the course of the American family, it became a novel, uncanny presence. With the introduction of telegraphy in the mid-19th century, a new virtual world—an uncanny “otherspace” of instantaneous communication over long distances, utterly new to the human experience—was unleashed. And for the next century, telegraphy, the telephone, and wireless radio all seemed to be teeming with phantom transmissions from other worlds, whether from the dead or from outer space.
Tales of television broadcast signals that intrude upon regularly-scheduled programming are by now a common cultural trope. In his seminal 2000 work, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce says that from its earliest days, television seemed to attract stories of weird, phantom signals. (He also notes with interest that the term for phantom images on television screens is “ghosts.”) Early in his book, Sconce introduces the story of a Long Island family convinced that their television is haunted. He also tells the urban legend of a test pattern from a Houston, Texas television station, KLEE-TV, being received on British televisions thousands of miles away. The fact that the station itself had ceased to be and changed its call letters years prior added to the weirdness of the story, but also helped expose it for the hoax it was.
However, roughly a quarter-century later, a regional television system in Britain did experience a legitimate broadcast intrusion, and this one purportedly came from a lot further away than Houston, Texas. In the early evening of November 28, 1977, a regular news bulletin on ITV’s regional broadcaster Southern Television was interrupted by a voice purporting to be a “representative from the Galactic [High] Command.” The intrusion lasted long enough to interrupt the rest of the news bulletin and part of a Looney Tunes cartoon. No recordings of the intrusion exist, although a contemporary student of New Age actualization and ufology, John Whitmore, claimed on British radio a month later to have heard a complete recording of the intrusion on tape. (Whitmore was involved with “the Nine” contactee group that ended up taking over the Esalen Institute in the late ’70s and early ’80s, ensnaring such luminaries as psychic Uri Geller and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.)
Whoever created this broadcast interruption was not only highly technically savvy but also deeply embedded in the folklore and culture around UFOs, and those associated with the Nine seem like a logical suspect. Their associate Stuart Holroyd, who wrote 1977’s Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, claimed that there was a plan on the part of aliens to interrupt television broadcasts on Earth—to be executed during the week of November 18-22, 1977. If the Nine were responsible, they were a week late for Holroyd’s prediction, but they chose their target well. Southern Television’s signal was one of the few regional transmitters at the time vulnerable to manipulation. A single transmitter in Hannington, Wiltshire received its feed not over a secure hard-wired connection but from a secondary transmitter on the Isle of Wight.
Several dubious transcripts of the intrusion have shown up in ufological books since. It’s fascinating that the single detail on which most accounts differ is the name of the representative of Galactic Command: some say it was “Asteron,” others “Gillon” or “Vrillon.” (There are also factions that believe the name could have been “Ashtar,” a figure from a 1950s contactee movement, or even “Vorilhon,” a.k.a. Claude Vorilhon, the founder of the Raelian UFO cult.) Whatever the true original text was, earwitnesses agree that the message concerned the aliens’ judgment over mankind’s tendency towards violence and savagery. The broadcast explicitly used 1970s New Age terminology (“the Age of Aquarius,” for example) to send humanity a warning. This sort of contact from aliens was common in both ufology and pop culture since the 1950s. The Southern Television broadcast intrusion proves a pleasing unity between ’50s UFO contactee culture and the ’70s UFO resurgence: the intrusion occurred a week after the US release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. British television had also recently seen the April Fools’ Day 1977 release of the mockumentary Alternative 3, about a mysterious “brain drain” of scientists being caused by Moon and Mars colonies being built for the elites to escape imminent ecological disaster on Earth.
Over in 1980s America, broadcast intrusions had a decidedly more earthbound, but no less uncanny, profile. With the explosion of satellite and cable television, and the increasing use of microwave transmissions to transmit both network and cable content, there were more and more venues for broadcast-breaking mischief-makers. In April of 1986, a Home Box Office airing of 1985 espionage thriller The Falcon and the Snowman was interrupted for over four minutes by a set of color bars with the text legend:
GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]
The identity of “Captain Midnight” was revealed after an intense, months-long investigation by the Federal Communications Commission. John R. MacDougall, a video technician and sometime satellite dish salesman, confessed to the crime and struck a plea bargain with authorities a few months after the incident. The story of how and why MacDougall decided to interfere with the HBO signal became the stuff of ’80s satellite broadcasting legend.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/ghost-in-a-box-the-haunting-history-of-television-broadcast-intrusions/
Ghost in a Box: The Haunting History of Television Broadcast Intrusions
by Michael Grasso / www.dailygrail.com/author/mg7810/
Tuesday, November 28th
Almost as soon as the television entered the American home, forever changing the course of the American family, it became a novel, uncanny presence. With the introduction of telegraphy in the mid-19th century, a new virtual world—an uncanny “otherspace” of instantaneous communication over long distances, utterly new to the human experience—was unleashed. And for the next century, telegraphy, the telephone, and wireless radio all seemed to be teeming with phantom transmissions from other worlds, whether from the dead or from outer space.
Tales of television broadcast signals that intrude upon regularly-scheduled programming are by now a common cultural trope. In his seminal 2000 work, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce says that from its earliest days, television seemed to attract stories of weird, phantom signals. (He also notes with interest that the term for phantom images on television screens is “ghosts.”) Early in his book, Sconce introduces the story of a Long Island family convinced that their television is haunted. He also tells the urban legend of a test pattern from a Houston, Texas television station, KLEE-TV, being received on British televisions thousands of miles away. The fact that the station itself had ceased to be and changed its call letters years prior added to the weirdness of the story, but also helped expose it for the hoax it was.
However, roughly a quarter-century later, a regional television system in Britain did experience a legitimate broadcast intrusion, and this one purportedly came from a lot further away than Houston, Texas. In the early evening of November 28, 1977, a regular news bulletin on ITV’s regional broadcaster Southern Television was interrupted by a voice purporting to be a “representative from the Galactic [High] Command.” The intrusion lasted long enough to interrupt the rest of the news bulletin and part of a Looney Tunes cartoon. No recordings of the intrusion exist, although a contemporary student of New Age actualization and ufology, John Whitmore, claimed on British radio a month later to have heard a complete recording of the intrusion on tape. (Whitmore was involved with “the Nine” contactee group that ended up taking over the Esalen Institute in the late ’70s and early ’80s, ensnaring such luminaries as psychic Uri Geller and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.)
Whoever created this broadcast interruption was not only highly technically savvy but also deeply embedded in the folklore and culture around UFOs, and those associated with the Nine seem like a logical suspect. Their associate Stuart Holroyd, who wrote 1977’s Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, claimed that there was a plan on the part of aliens to interrupt television broadcasts on Earth—to be executed during the week of November 18-22, 1977. If the Nine were responsible, they were a week late for Holroyd’s prediction, but they chose their target well. Southern Television’s signal was one of the few regional transmitters at the time vulnerable to manipulation. A single transmitter in Hannington, Wiltshire received its feed not over a secure hard-wired connection but from a secondary transmitter on the Isle of Wight.
Several dubious transcripts of the intrusion have shown up in ufological books since. It’s fascinating that the single detail on which most accounts differ is the name of the representative of Galactic Command: some say it was “Asteron,” others “Gillon” or “Vrillon.” (There are also factions that believe the name could have been “Ashtar,” a figure from a 1950s contactee movement, or even “Vorilhon,” a.k.a. Claude Vorilhon, the founder of the Raelian UFO cult.) Whatever the true original text was, earwitnesses agree that the message concerned the aliens’ judgment over mankind’s tendency towards violence and savagery. The broadcast explicitly used 1970s New Age terminology (“the Age of Aquarius,” for example) to send humanity a warning. This sort of contact from aliens was common in both ufology and pop culture since the 1950s. The Southern Television broadcast intrusion proves a pleasing unity between ’50s UFO contactee culture and the ’70s UFO resurgence: the intrusion occurred a week after the US release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. British television had also recently seen the April Fools’ Day 1977 release of the mockumentary Alternative 3, about a mysterious “brain drain” of scientists being caused by Moon and Mars colonies being built for the elites to escape imminent ecological disaster on Earth.
Over in 1980s America, broadcast intrusions had a decidedly more earthbound, but no less uncanny, profile. With the explosion of satellite and cable television, and the increasing use of microwave transmissions to transmit both network and cable content, there were more and more venues for broadcast-breaking mischief-makers. In April of 1986, a Home Box Office airing of 1985 espionage thriller The Falcon and the Snowman was interrupted for over four minutes by a set of color bars with the text legend:
GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]
The identity of “Captain Midnight” was revealed after an intense, months-long investigation by the Federal Communications Commission. John R. MacDougall, a video technician and sometime satellite dish salesman, confessed to the crime and struck a plea bargain with authorities a few months after the incident. The story of how and why MacDougall decided to interfere with the HBO signal became the stuff of ’80s satellite broadcasting legend.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/ghost-in-a-box-the-haunting-history-of-television-broadcast-intrusions/