Gear up for Armageddon- Strange Warning Messages Startled TV Viewers in Orange County.
Television viewers across the Orange County area were in for a surprise on the morning of 21st September. Most of the Californians enjoy their breakfast with TV shows, but this Thursday was different as a majority of the regular, scheduled programs were disrupted with strange, mysterious warning messages informing viewers about the upcoming invasion of extra-terrestrials and the onset of Armageddon.
According to Orange County, these weird warning messages appeared on mainstream TV channels and affected Spectrum and Cox cable users. Some of the warning videos have been uploaded on YouTube. In one of the videos, we can hear a breathless voice stating that the “space program” has been contacted with and “they are not what they claim to be.” The whole message read:
“The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming—the military—I’m sorry the government knows about them…”
According to Gizmodo, the audio sound has been taken from a call received back in 1997 by the host Art Bell of popular radio show Coast to Coast AM. The call was made by a person who claimed to be an ex-employee at Area51. It is amusing that this was a conspiracy-theory-themed show.
There are other videos available on YouTube as well, but the warning voice is different while the emergency alert is somewhat the same as all of them inform about the onset of “extremely violent time.”
As far as the scope of impact is concerned in the latest of such cases, Cox spokesperson Todd Smith claimed that the company is not sure regarding the number of affected customers and they are trying to identify the location from where the mysterious messages were aired.
As per Smith’s understanding, their system received the signals after one or more radio stations caught them while carrying out regular, monthly emergency testing. When radio stations conduct such tests, they usually send out an end tone to inform cable networks about the completion of the alerts, but it is apparent that no such signal was transmitted in this situation.
Nevertheless, the emergency alert videos interrupted scheduled programming for about a minute, and viewers were stunned when they heard that the end of the world is approaching. According to a Lake Forest resident and user of Cox cable network, Stacy Laflamme, she was watching the HGTV channel when suddenly the show was replaced by an emergency alert at exactly 11:05 a.m. The message was followed by a creepy audio as well while the screen flashed this message:
“Realize this, extremely violent times will come.”
An alarmed Laflamme believed it to be Hitler’s voice.
Spectrum cable system’s user Erin Mireles from Diamond Bar was watching Bravo channel when the show was replaced with a similar warning, which naturally left her “startled.”
“I was definitely startled, ’cause the volume increased exponentially. I wasn’t alarmed in the sense of thinking something was wrong, ’cause I assumed it was some sort of hack. My channel changed back to Bravo after a couple minutes.”
This is no the first time when TV broadcasts have been hacked to display unrelated footage. In the past, Palestinian hackers remotely took control of Israeli TV stations on two occasions. In the first attack, hackers changed the ongoing transmission with images of Palestinian citizens affected and wounded by Israeli airstrikes over Gaza Strip while in the second attack hackers replaced the ongoing transmissions with Muslims’ call to prayer.
However, since in the Orange County case it is unclear whether it was a hack attack or a glitch, the story can relate to the 1987 incident in which a mysterious apocalyptic message interrupted TV broadcasts in California with ‘Violent Times Will Come’ message.
