Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

If you have a taste for the odder side of life, you have probably heard of the still-unexplained “Max Headroom” hijacking.  A similar, but less-remembered incident occurred in southern England ten years earlier, and a good time was definitely not had by all.  The Arlington Heights “Daily Herald,” December 12, 1977:

The Voice of Asteron has not been identified, as of this writing, making him the first UFV (Unidentified Flying Voice) in space-age history. Breaking in on a Southern Television evening news program with a series of bleeps, UFV announced to the world, or at least to the people in that part of England: 

“This is the voice of Asteron. I am an authorized representative of the intergalactic mission, and I have a message for the planet earth. We are beginning to enter the period of Aquarius, and there are many corrections which have to be made by earth people. 

“All your weapons of evil must be destroyed. You only have a short time to learn to live together in peace--or leave the galaxy.” 

A Southern Television spokesman, sounding rather like a TV critic, said of the impromptu substitute programming: “This is a pretty sick hoax.” 

The police found the Voice of Asteron guilty of disturbing the peace. A police spokesman complained: “Most people took it quite seriously, and some were frightened. We had to send a patrol car around to calm one elderly woman.” 

An average viewer named Rex Monger was invited to give his opinion on UFV. 

“The man seemed to suggest that he was speaking from a spacecraft traveling within the vicinity of earth,” Monger concluded. “He sounded pretty fed up with the way we are running things down here.” 

American hoax-veterans recalled Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast, which convinced a lot of radio listeners that New Jersey was being invaded by Martians back in 1938. Younger students of put-on thought the whole business--including the TV and police spokesmen and the man-in-the-street--bore a certain resemblance to a Monty Python script.

In all the excitement over what other people thought, nobody got around to asking: Who is the Voice of Asteron and what was he thinking? Here are a couple of guesses:

The Voice of Asteron is that awful earth-bound fellow--the practical joker. (The trouble with this theory is that if UFV was just out to scare folks, wouldn’t he have invented a more frightening request than “live together in peace,” and a more chilling punishment than “leave the galaxy”?)

The Voice of Asteron is an engineer with a lot of sophisticated equipment and an irresistible urge to test it. As the ultimate Good Buddy of the CB world, all he wanted to prove was that he could jam a network. The rest was fancy plot. 

The Voice of Asteron is a media freak--a man who has steeped himself in science fiction, seen “Network” one too many times and been carried away into staging his own events. 

The Voice of Asteron is a pacifist who has, in all earnestness, dramatized his message to attract the most attention, little realizing that his audience would pay attention to everything except what he actually said.

The voice of Asteron is a combination of all four of the above. 

In his short story “The Enormous Radio,” John Cheever imagined what it would be like if, out of one’s speaker, suddenly emerged the private conversations of apartment neighbors. Cheever’s fable gave off the curiously haunted sense of a universe out of kilter, though nothing that exceptional was said. It was the sheer unexpectedness, plus the disturbing confusion between the boundaries of public and private. The same might be said of the Voice of Asteron. One can imagine a network television commentator advocating more and bigger weapons--and causing no particular disturbance at all. The television set in the corner is the familiar monster, out of whose mouth come the most bizarre advertisements, the least credible plots, the cruelest images. Yet, if all the sponsors and staff announcers are in place, nobody blinks a fixated eye--except, of course, any aliens from outer space, who might well require a visit from their nearest intergalactic policeman to calm them down.

As was the case with the “Max Headroom” hoax, the identity of “Asteron” has never been discovered.