Early in the morning on April 27th, 1986, the East Coast broadcast feed for the television station HBO was interrupted by a mysterious message, consisting of a standard color test pattern and a somewhat politely worded warning message:
GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]
It’s quite the complex story to explain, requiring quite a bit of back story, but I will try to simplify it here:
A man by the name of John MacDougall, who’s daytime job was in satellite dish sales, also happened to work over night at a relay station for a local south Florida pay TV service. He was rather ticked that HBO had decided to start scrambling their video feed, forcing people who wanted HBO to pay for descrambling equipment as well as a monthly fee for the channel. This was hurting his dish sales massively – people option for higher end TV service were going with cable due to it being a slightly easier and much more affordable option, and he was, understandably, upset.
Once his nights duties were done at the relay station, he returned his satellite equipment to it’s resting position, which happened to perfectly align with the satellite that carried the HBO feed for the East Coast, and he had an idea to broadcast a message on their frequency sort of politely warning them that customers, and business owners, didn’t like this decision and that other channels should keep their broadcasts the way they were.
So, it was on that night that MacDougall started the character and test pattern generator on his equipment and began to transmit his message. HBO noticed this and, as you can see in the video below, tried to overpower him, but he kept cranking up the power – they feared damage to the satellite or their equipment and thus let him continue until after a few minutes he cut the signal and let the movie that was playing, The Falcon and the Snowman, continue.
MacDougall was eventually caught and fined, but interestingly, not long after his stunt, satellite dish sales began to boom, and he still, to this day, runs his satellite dish and electronics business!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_signal_intrusion
http://www.textfiles.com/100/captmidn.txt
http://www.macdougallelect.com/bio.html
The video below is a recording of the actual incident – you can see HBO trying to override Captain Midnight, only for him to up his own strength.