![]() It’s fascinating that the single detail on which most accounts differ is the name of the representative of Galactic Command: some say it was “Asteron,” others “Gillon” or “Vrillon.” (There are also factions that believe the name could have been “Ashtar,” a figure from a 1950s contactee movement, or even “Vorilhon,” a.k.a. Several dubious transcripts of the intrusion have shown up in ufological books since. A single transmitter in Hannington, Wiltshire received its feed not over a secure hard-wired connection but from a secondary transmitter on the Isle of Wight. Southern Television’s signal was one of the few regional transmitters at the time vulnerable to manipulation. If the Nine were responsible, they were a week late for Holroyd’s prediction, but they chose their target well. Their associate Stuart Holroyd, who wrote 1977’s Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, claimed that there was a plan on the part of aliens to interrupt television broadcasts on Earth-to be executed during the week of November 18-22, 1977. Whoever created this broadcast interruption was not only highly technically savvy but also deeply embedded in the folklore and culture around UFOs, and those associated with the Nine seem like a logical suspect. Puharich wrote Geller’s 1974 biography Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller. Psychic Uri Geller with “The Nine” leader Andrija Puharich, early 1970s. (Whitmore was involved with “ the Nine” contactee group that ended up taking over the Esalen Institute in the late ’70s and early ’80s, ensnaring such luminaries as psychic Uri Geller and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.) No recordings of the intrusion exist, although a contemporary student of New Age actualization and ufology, John Whitmore, claimed on British radio a month later to have heard a complete recording of the intrusion on tape. In the early evening of November 28, 1977, a regular news bulletin on ITV’s regional broadcaster Southern Television was interrupted by a voice purporting to be a “representative from the Galactic Command.” The intrusion lasted long enough to interrupt the rest of the news bulletin and part of a Looney Tunes cartoon. However, roughly a quarter-century later, a regional television system in Britain did experience a legitimate broadcast intrusion, and this one purportedly came from a lot further away than Houston, Texas. The fact that the station itself had ceased to be and changed its call letters years prior added to the weirdness of the story, but also helped expose it for the hoax it was. He also tells the urban legend of a test pattern from a Houston, Texas television station, KLEE-TV, being received on British televisions thousands of miles away. (He also notes with interest that the term for phantom images on television screens is “ ghosts.”) Early in his book, Sconce introduces the story of a Long Island family convinced that their television is haunted. In his seminal 2000 work, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce says that from its earliest days, television seemed to attract stories of weird, phantom signals. Tales of television broadcast signals that intrude upon regularly-scheduled programming are by now a common cultural trope. And for the next century, telegraphy, the telephone, and wireless radio all seemed to be teeming with phantom transmissions from other worlds, whether from the dead or from outer space. With the introduction of telegraphy in the mid-19th century, a new virtual world-an uncanny “otherspace” of instantaneous communication over long distances, utterly new to the human experience-was unleashed. Almost as soon as the television entered the American home, forever changing the course of the American family, it became a novel, uncanny presence.
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