Vrillon hoax incident

Vrillon, a representative of the purported extraterrestrial society, Ashtar Galactic Command, was the name used by an unidentified voice that was broadcast on the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority in the United Kingdom for six minutes at 5:10 PM on Saturday November 26, 1977. The strange incident attracted considerable publicity in the next day's Sunday newspapers, with the IBA immediately pronouncing that the broadcast was a hoax. It was the first time such a hoax transmission had been made.
The voice, which was disguised and accompanied by a deep buzzing, broke into the broadcast of the local ITV station Southern Television, over-riding the UHF audio signal of the early-evening news being read by Ivor Mills from ITN to warn viewers of "the destiny of your race" and "so that you may communicate to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid a disaster which threatens your world and the beings on other worlds around you".
As the broadcast did not affect the video signal, it was difficult to detect its source, and the transmission disappeared at the end of what sounded like a prepared statement. Observers noted that the hoax could have been achieved by directing a powerful signal at the Hannington UHF transmitter. Hannington was unusual in being one of the few transmitters which received the signal it was broadcasting using radio frequency transmissions rather than a landline. The IBA stated that to carry out the hoax would take "a considerable amount of technical know-how".
At the end of the "rogue transmission", as the signal faded back, short bursts of the adverts playing after the news bulletin can be heard, then the Southern TV ident music, then a Looney Tunes cartoon, the Art Davis cartoon "The Goofy Gophers". The broadcast is presently a footnote in ufology and does not represent a particularly significant development in pirate television broadcasting, supplanted largely by the boom around 1984.

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