Years later, a man surfaced on Reddit, claiming to have known the guy behind the incident. He stated that the man had a hijacked radio and was autistic. This man later said who he believed was behind the incident was not at all Max and had no involvement in the highjacking.
Neither TV technicians nor the FBI were able to find out anything to capture the culprits. To this day this TV hijacking crime (one of the most famous and biggest of its kind) remains unsolved.
Some days after the incident, Chicago's NBC used clips from the incident as a joke during their newscast.
The full sequence started in the night of 27th November 1987, when the US television station WGN Channel 9 in Chicago, IL was infamously hijacked by a man wearing a Max Headroom mask. The man managed to hack into the station on two occasions during that night, firstly during a local news bulletin for 30 seconds, and again two hours later for a further 90 seconds during a repeat of Doctor Who (1963)'s episode Horror of Fang Rock: Part One (1977). The man is shown staring into the camera with a menacing grin, and during the second interruption began addressing the camera speaking a nonsensical and surrealist monologue with his voice distorted: he talked about TV host Charles Swirsky saying he was better than him and calling him "frickin' liberal"; he said the famous Coca-Cola slogan "Catch the wave", but with a Pepsi can in his hands before throwing it to the ground and making "the bird" partially off-screen to be so close of the camera, with his middle right finger covered by a fake finger; he said "Your love is fading", referring The Temptations' song "(I Know) I'm Losing You"; he hummed TV cartoon Clutch Cargo (1959)'s theme to say in the middle of the humming "I still see the X" (usually confused as "I stole CBS") referring the title of Cargo's last episode Big "X" (1959); he complained of "my piles" (usually confused as "my files"); he claimed he did a masterpiece for the World Greatest Newspapers' nerds; he put on a left-hand dirty glove explaining that his brother wore another one (a reference to famous Michael Jackson's right hand's glove he wore in the 80s), before being spanked by a girl partially off screen with a flyswatter. Despite the several attempts, he has never been traced nor identified.
According to WTTW station spokesman Anders Yocom, technicians monitoring the transmission "attempted to take corrective measures, but couldn't". In the interview for Chicago Tribune he told: "By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over".