Off hand, I don't know whether this story was ever mentioned in
Fortean Times.
This case had been discussed here on the message board, but it seems to have gone MIA. Here's a recap ...
The Lost TV Signal (aka TV Signal From The Past) was a staple of the paranormal / "strange-but-true" books of the 1950s and 1960s. The story really took off after it was published in a 1958
Reader's Digest. As it turns out, it was one part of an advertising hoax that became a well-known legend after the advertising campaign was long forgotten.
Here's a summary:
In 1953 TV station KPRC (Houston, Texas) received a letter from the UK. The letter claimed UK TV viewers had unexpectedly seen a TV station ID card for station KLEE in Houston appear on their TV screens. Here's an image of the ID card:
The letter included a photo of the ID card displayed on a TV screen and stated its mysterious appearance occurred on 14 September 1953. Multiple other American TV stations received the same form letter with photos of their own ID cards supposedly displayed on UK TV sets.
The KLEE letter carried a different implication from all the others. KLEE was established in 1949 and sold off, becoming KPRC, in mid-1950. A 1953 transmission of an ID card for a TV station defunct for over 2 years implied a signal that somehow reappeared after that length of time.
As it was eventually determined, the whole thing was the result of a UK advertising hoax. Promoters of a new line of British TVs collected or replicated images of TV ID cards from around the world, displayed them on one of the new TVs, and sent a wave of form letters to TV stations in other countries. The objective was to spread a meme to the effect that the new TVs were so sensitive they would pick up broadcast transmissions from thousands of miles away.
NOTE: At the time, everyone seems to have overlooked one simple fact ... As of 1953 UK TVs and American TVs used entirely different and incompatible screen scanning / display formats, and there's no way an American transmission could display legibly on a UK TV set.
The actual hoax was revealed back in the early 1950s, but the story took on a life of its own and became one of the most repeated "strange-but-true" tales of the era.
See, for example:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/legend-of-klee-tv/
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...ost-TV-signal-that-came-back-from-outer-space
http://www.texasescapes.com/MikeCoxTexasTales/Great-Texas-British-TV-Hoax-of-1953.htm
http://historysdumpster.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-legend-of-klee-tv.html
