The Internet’s Most Disturbing Mysteries Get Even Darker | Vol. 15

September 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

On a Sunday night in November 1987, roughly three million Chicago viewers watching the post-Bears game news on WGN saw the screen die. What replaced it was not static or a technical difficulties card, but a person in a rubber Max Headroom mask, standing in front of a spinning sheet of corrugated metal, accompanied by a mechanical buzzing sound. The hijacking lasted about 25 seconds before WGN engineers, physically present at the transmitter, switched frequencies and knocked the intruder off the air. Two hours later, the same person struck a softer target: WTTW, Chicago’s public broadcasting station, whose transmitter on the Sears Tower was unmanned at 11 p.m. on a Sunday. The intruder got the floor for a full 90 seconds, producing one of the strangest broadcasts in American television history—mocking a sportscaster by name, humming a deep-cut cartoon theme, holding up a Pepsi can (a jab at Max Headroom’s Coca-Cola sponsorship), and culminating in a spanking with a fly swatter administered by a second person in a maid outfit. The FCC and FBI investigated. They never made an arrest.

The Shape of an Unsolvable Crime

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Theme** - The host frames the episode around a single pattern: the gap between information existing and information arriving
3 (01:48) **The Max Headroom Broadcast Hijacking** - Chicago, November 22, 1987: a person in a rubber mask hijacks two TV stations by overpowering their microwave link signals
4 (08:36) **Why the Hijacking Was Never Solved** - Four structural reasons explain why the case remains open after 38 years
5 (11:51) **Comparison to Other Broadcast Intrusions** - Contrasting the Chicago case with solved intrusions shows what made it unique
6 (13:46) **The Internet Era & The Case's Afterlife** - The video became a permanent fixture of online mystery culture, but the statute of limitations has expired
7 (19:00) **The Hawaii False Missile Alert** - January 13, 2018: every phone in Hawaii received a ballistic missile warning that was entirely false

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

How much stranger does the internet become the deeper you look?

The internet has preserved some of the most unsettling, mysterious, and difficult-to-explain moments of the modern era. Some began as broadcasts seen by thousands of people. Others appeared as obscure photographs, cryptic recordings, strange websites, or videos whose origins became mysteries of their own.

In this documentary, we explore another collection of disturbing stories from around the internet — separating documented events from speculation, online theories, and mysteries that remain unresolved.

We revisit the infamous Max Headroom signal hijacking, when television broadcasts in Chicago were interrupted by a masked figure and the people responsible were never publicly identified. We also examine the terrifying 2018 Hawaii false missile alert, which sent an emergency warning to phones across the islands before officials confirmed that no missile was actually approaching.

But the deeper we go, the stranger the stories become.

From unusual photographs with disputed explanations to mysterious recordings that spread across online communities, we look at how fragments of information can become enormous internet mysteries — especially when their original context disappears.

One of the strangest examples is 11B-X-1371, a cryptic video filled with coded imagery and hidden messages that triggered years of online investigation. Its creator eventually came forward, but questions surrounding the project helped turn it into one of the internet’s most memorable viral mysteries.

Along the way, we examine what is actually known, what remains uncertain, and how easily fact, rumor, coincidence, and speculation can become intertwined once a mystery spreads online.

And sometimes, discovering the explanation only leads to another question.

Watch to the end as we explore another collection of strange broadcasts, unexplained images, mysterious videos, and disturbing stories preserved by the internet.

💬 Which mystery in this episode did you find the hardest to explain?

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