The Wyoming Incident
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About
The Wyoming Incident is a video and creepypasta story about a hijacked television broadcast displaying a compilation of disturbing imagery and text. In the story, the video is compared to the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion which occurred in late November 1987 in Chicago, Illinois.
Origin
Sometime prior to late January 2007, a series of videos began circulating online along with a creepypasta story about a fictional television broadcast hijacking that occurred in the area of Niobrara county in Wyoming, Nebraska. According to the Something Awful Wiki, the story was a prank and alternate reality game orchestrated by Something Awful goons Senor Bambos and The Detector.[4]
The Wyoming Incident (or The Wyoming Hijacking) is a lesser known case of television broadcast hijacking/hacking. A hacker managed to interrupt broadcasts from a local programming channel (believed to serve several smaller communities in the county of Niobrara) 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. This clip is taken from one of these intervals.
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, etc. 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.
This video is significant in that is one of the most recent television hijackings. Such actions were rare even in the '80s (search for Chicago Max Headroom Incident) and are even more rare today. The hacker has not yet been caught, and all attempts to trace the video have proven futile.
Spread
On January 25th, 2007, Snopes[5] Forums user DarkDan submitted the story in a thread titled "Wyoming TV Hijack." On February 5th, YouTuber GiveMeANumber uploaded a video titled "Weird Video I Found," showing black-and-white slides of text and disembodied 3D heads (shown below). On February 21st, video clips and links to the story were posted on the Unfiction Forums.[2] Two days later, the story was submitted in a thread on Something Awful.[3]
On September 10th, YouTuber _ jonrev_ uploaded a video titled "The Wyoming Incident" (shown below). The video starts off with a presidential election speech before the video cuts to static, where it then shows various personal questions on black backgrounds, followed by clips from the original Wyoming Incident videos.
Over the next 10 years, the video accumulated upwards of 2.8 million views. On December 6th, 2010, the creepypasta story about the video was submitted to the Creepypasta Wiki.[1] On May 18th, 2016, YouTuber Night Mind uploaded an episode of the Night Mind Casefiles about the Wyoming Incident story (shown below).
Search Interest
External References
[1] Creepypasta – The Wyoming Incident
[2] Internet Archive – Wyoming Incident
[3] Something Awful – Bizarre Wyoming TV signal hijack mystery
[4] Something Awful – The Wyoming Incident
[5] Snopes – Wyoming TV Hijack
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