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It Came From The Cathode Ray Tube (Weird TV Incidents)

I remember in the late 70's watching the Quatermas and the Pit on TV at my sister's flat. My brother-in-law left a cigarette lighter standing on the TV. When the part in the film, where the crane goes into the projection(?) of the locust/ Martian being ( hope I'm not spooling it for anyone who hasn't see it!!!), the cigarette lighter flew off the TV!!!! We all jump out of our skins!!!! After the film we had a good laugh but it was startling at the time.
 
I remember a friend of mine saying that one niight in the 60's, him and his Dad and brothers, stayed up after the close down and saw an episode of Thunderbirds!!! He seems to remember that it was before Thunderbirds was screened. I seem to think now that it could probably be a trial to see how it would look on TV.
 
What an enjoyable read this thread has been, just the sort of stuff I like :)

Now... onto an idea that my tired brain won't let go of. The link about the KLEE-TV ident mentioned that one of the theories could be:
2. The signals may have rebounded from a celestial object a light year and a half away. This would be a mathematical miracle if it happened once. Several times is just too fantastic for belief.


And Vardoger asked:
Regarding receiving old TV-signals.
What if TV-signals sent out to space years ago had been bounced back from an object in space several light years away and back to the earth?
I know it sounds unlikely, but perhaps it is possible.


And finally the Practical Television magazine (oh how I'd love to read that magazine!) letter-writer surmised that:
A correspondent writing in a later issue of the same magazine appears to solve the mystery by suggesting the 'conversations' may be American or Canadian broadcasts bouncing off the Earth's ionosphere (Sporadic E Propagation). He points out that he experienced similar phenomenon around sunset on 13th October 1956 when E layer activity was at its peak.



So.

Is it, in fact, possible for broadcasts which once were to be received back to us, at some later time? If they bounced off something rather than continuing to propagate forward (and how far can they go, unhindered? Voyager springs to mind...)

But... if it is indeed possible, why don't we get them (more often than the sporadic cases postulated on this thread)? Is the sad demise of analogue broadcasting to blame? (i.e. we would no longer have the technology with which to receive them?) Or would they be so weak as to largely go undetected?
 
Back in the early 80's IIRC,when the big fiberglass sat dishes were all the rage for TV,
I got one and found a once a week program that I think was called "cosmic connection".
It was a cheaply done show that was hosted by an eccentric little man and showed the most up to date UFO photos and eyewitness accounts that went with the photos.
Also there was a "classic case" segment which showed the older unsolved cases and photos of the objects.
I watched the program for about a month or more and after showing a short film of an alleged landing at a military base of some kind the program never came on again.
It was supposed to have been secretly recorded,so it was from a distance sufficient enough to obscure any faces or details other than the ones I mention.
The film showed an area encircled by soldiers armed with what appeared to be M-16 rifles and all facing away from the area as if guarding it.
AN officer then walks into view and watches a classic disc shaped craft with a domed top land in a "falling leaf" pattern,and after landing "legs" came out of the craft it settled on them and a stairway of sorts came down from it and a door opened.
The officer type went to the beings who came out and shook hands with one of the three
beings who appeared humanoid and wearing some kind of space suits.
Then the film stopped and the host claimed it was (of course) a top secret piece he had gotten from an anonymous source proving that the military was and had been in contact since the truman era.
As stated above, this was the last time the program was aired, and I have wondered if anyone else had rememberd seeing it and if the alleged contact film was clipped from a movie or where it could have come from.
I have never seen it anywhere else to my memory.
Anyone ever recall seeing this clip, or the program?
I have never seen any movies with this scene in it,and it looked very authentic.

(edited for horrible spelling)


I must have missed this old post when I last read this thread, as this is the sort of thing I would have looked up after reading, which I have just done! And, lo and behold, I found a YouTube channel with episodes of the early cable/satellite show mentioned, Cosmic Connection.

The show looks so weird and so low budget, in a strangely good way!


https://www.youtube.com/user/tvufo/videos
 
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The 1980 comedy movie Used Cars is being released on Blu-ray next week, which reminded me, there's a subplot in it where two rival used car salesmen try to sabotage the other's business. One uses pirate TV, just like the Max Headroom stunt a few years later, including interrupting a football game and the Presidential Address with bad taste gags about their enemy.

It wasn't a hit when first released, but it did go on to cult popularity in the mid-80s when home video was taking off. Could the real life pirates have been influenced by that fiction?
 
The 1980 comedy movie Used Cars is being released on Blu-ray next week, which reminded me, there's a subplot in it where two rival used car salesmen try to sabotage the other's business. One uses pirate TV, just like the Max Headroom stunt a few years later, including interrupting a football game and the Presidential Address with bad taste gags about their enemy.

It wasn't a hit when first released, but it did go on to cult popularity in the mid-80s when home video was taking off. Could the real life pirates have been influenced by that fiction?

I saw Used Cars in first release, I thought it was funny as hell, and it mystified me when it didn't receive the same kind of approval given similar satires of the era. Anyway ...

Television broadcast intrusions didn't start with the Max Headroom incident (1987), and they pre-dated Used Cars (1980). For example, the Vrillon broadcast incident:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Television_broadcast_interruption

... occurred in 1977 - raising the possibility that it (or multiple less famous broadcast screw-ups and interruptions) were the inspiration for the movie's use of the trope.

In any case, there were two widely-known TV broadcast intrusions more closely preceding the Max Headroom incident:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_signal_intrusion (April, 1986)
- The CBN intrusion into the Playboy satellite feed in September, 1987

... that would seem to more strongly recommend themselves as likely suspects for inspiring the Chicago Max incident.
 
Maybe the technology was catching up with the ambition to break into TV signals? Surprising it didn't happen more often, really, and maybe more surprising it petered out aside from a few cases.
 
Didn't see a thread for this recent article related to a 1950's event ...

Post moved here, where such mystery signals / broadcasts have been cited.
 
Didn't see a thread for this recent article related to a 1950's event: The mystery of the 'lost TV signal' that came back from outer space. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...t-came-back-from-outer-space?detail=emaildkre
(Spoiler: It was a hoax.) But, it has the standard Fortean elements (until someone figured out it was a hoax).

(And things "Fortean" also get a mention: https://www.dailykos.com/comments/1902100/75607078#comment_75607078 )
I was so sad to see this debunked. It was one of my favorite tales of TX Forteana.
 
I was so sad to see this debunked. It was one of my favorite tales of TX Forteana.
I have some memories of a story like this, not sure if it's the same exact story. It had the same basic elements to the story. When I recently read this article that I posted, the story 'rang a bell'.
I gather that you remember this actual particular story? (Just curious.)
 
I have some memories of a story like this, not sure if it's the same exact story. It had the same basic elements to the story. When I recently read this article that I posted, the story 'rang a bell'.
I gather that you remember this actual particular story? (Just curious.)

The KLEE / Texas version is the most specific version of the story, but it was a staple of Frank Edwards style "strange things" collections back in the 1950s / 1960s.
 
I have some memories of a story like this, not sure if it's the same exact story. It had the same basic elements to the story. When I recently read this article that I posted, the story 'rang a bell'.
I gather that you remember this actual particular story? (Just curious.)
The KLEE / Texas version is the most specific version of the story, but it was a staple of Frank Edwards style "strange things" collections back in the 1950s / 1960s.
I don't remember actual story specifics, that's what made it spooky. I even wondered if it was a local FW/D station that was bouncing around.
 
Reminds me a bit of the episode of the 00's comedy Supernova. Horney and impaired young astrologers saw god, maybe. It was explained as Pertwee images bouncing.
 
In FT390, there's a story about an Indianapolis family terrorised by a spy who taunts them through their TV screen via messages from their AT&T cable box. It happened in 2014, but I can't find any reference to this online - it does sound similar to another story of a few years ago, though the detail about the taunter being a sexual pervert who focuses on the young daughter of the family means it might be a different one (I don't recall that part in the other story).

Anyone recall this/able to find out more?
 
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