Television is supposed to be safe. A box in your living room delivering sports, sitcoms, and soap operas — predictable, controllable, comforting. But sometimes the box becomes a portal, a weak spot in the matrix where someone else’s chaos can pour in. Wyoming, 1987: a local broadcast hijacked, faces detached, eyes staring, bodies never fully present, a frequency humming between 17 and 19 Hz. The kind of frequency that makes your own eyes betray you, that turns your perception into a live hallucination. Residents reported vomiting, headaches, even visions. Paranormal? Not quite. Biological. Electromagnetic. A hacker with a taste for terror and subtle torture.

Hijacking the Familiar

Imagine the normalcy of your nightly news disrupted. That’s what happened in Niobrara County, Wyoming. A hacker seized control of a local channel and began a broadcast of disembodied human heads — twisted, posed, staring, moving, changing camera angles every ten to fifteen seconds. Every so often, the screen declared a “SPECIAL PRESENTATION,” a reminder that this wasn’t sanctioned. What could have been an anonymous, forgettable prank turned memorable, because the human brain is not built to ignore subtle sensory assault. Eyes vibrate. Hallucinations bloom. The brain, tricked by frequencies, begins to betray the body.

The local channel wasn’t broken. Your mind was. #BroadcastHijack #WyomingIncident #FrequencyTerror share this

The Wyoming Incident (or The Wyoming Hijacking) is a case of television broadcast hijacking/hacking. A hacker managed to interrupt broadcasts from a local programming channel and aired his/her own video. The video contained numerous clips of disembodied, human heads showing various emotions and “poses.”

The camera position changed often (usually every ten-to-fifteen seconds) and the video was often interrupted by a “SPECIAL PRESENTATION” announcement.

The video is mostly locally well-known, and would probably not even be that popular if it were not for the effects it had on the few residents who watched it for an extended period of time.

Complaints included vomiting, hallucinations & headaches.

While some believed it was paranormal, specialists have determined that the cause of these afflictions were frequencies played regularly throughout the broadcast. In this clip, the frequency being played is somewhere between 17 and 19 hz.

This range of frequency, when played for long periods of time, causes the eyes to subtly vibrate, sometimes inducing visual hallucinations.

The Max Headroom Chicago Hack

Max Headroom: Chicago’s TV Nightmare

Then came Chicago, 1987. Channel 9’s Nine O’Clock News. Dan Roan narrates the Bears’ victory. And suddenly, the signal flickers into nothingness. Technicians watch helplessly as the hijack begins. A squat figure in a rubbery mask, sunglasses, frozen grin, bouncing maniacally — Nixon meets the Joker. Static hisses. A spinning slab of metal hypnotizes. The broadcast you trusted becomes the message itself: you are no longer in control. Public television transformed into private theater of absurdity. This wasn’t art; it wasn’t news. It was an intruder inside the signal, inside the mind of the viewer.

When TV stops being a window and starts being a portal, do you really want to watch? #MaxHeadroom #Hijack #SignalIntrusion share this

 

The Frequencies Behind the Fear

Both the Wyoming Incident and the Max Headroom hijacking hint at the hidden language of signals. Frequencies, subtle, almost invisible, manipulating perception. The Niobrara broadcast employed 17–19 Hz — a range that causes micro-vibrations in the eye, enough to produce hallucinations without any chemical input. Television becomes a vector. Art, technology, and terror intersect. The hacker isn’t just showing you images; they’re bending your sensory machinery, proving that even in your living room, your perception is never fully your own.

Television is supposed to be safe. But 19 Hz whispers, your eyes start lying. #FrequencyHack #PerceptionTrap #WyomingAndChicago share this

Wearing a ghoulish rubbery mask with sunglasses and a frozen grin, the mysterious intruder looked like a cross between Richard Nixon and the Joker.

 

Broadcast hijacking may seem modern, but it has roots in experimentation with electromagnetic signals throughout the 20th century. From early radio interference experiments in the 1920s to unauthorized television intrusions in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of manipulating perception via airwaves has fascinated engineers and pranksters alike. The Max Headroom incident wasn’t just a stunt; it was the culmination of decades of exploration into the vulnerabilities of broadcast infrastructure. Some of the earliest tests involved frequency interference to study human perception, laying groundwork for what would eventually be exploited in high-profile hijacks.

References:
Wyoming Broadcast Hijacking
The Max Headroom Signal Intrusion
Electromagnetic Frequencies and Human Perception