TV Broadcast Interrupted By Apocalyptic Messages in California

Last Thursday, an eerie emergency broadcast interrupted the regularly scheduled programs on Cox and Spectrum Cable in Los Angels' Orange County area. If you’ve watched cable television, you know the drill: the screen goes blank, the harsh sound of alarm plays in threes, followed by a message on ticker that says something like “This is a test of the emergency system. This is only a test.”

But on this particular day, the cable subscribers in Orange County were greeted by an audio-recorded message they had never heard before.

“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…”

In another version of the message broadcast that same day, a man's voice warned the people at home that an "extremely violent times will come."

Needless to say, the mysterious message quickly snowballed into speculations about it being a sign of the end times on social media, particularly in the light of a mildly popular prediction that the world would end on September 23rd. So where did the message come from? Gizmodo traced the alien-themed message back to a call made to Art Bell of Coast to Coast AM, a conspiracy-theory-themed radio show, in 1997. (The full message is extremely creepy and cool if you're into that sort of thing). Redditor smittenkitten77 traced the audio of the other message to Christian radio program Insight for Living with Chuck Swindoll.

"It felt like a scene ripped out of Farenheit 451," said Redditor 6andahalfGrapples.

So now the question is, were these interruptions a sign of the end times or just a hoax? Seeing as the end times have yet to happen, despite a mildly popular prediction that they'd come on September 23rd, it appears that the messages were broadcast as a hoax, though neither Spectrum or Cox has confirmed a hack. All Spectrum spokesperson Dennis Johnson has said is "We were fed an incorrect audio file."

Either way, life appears to be going on as “normally” as “normal” can be in 2017, so that's all folks, keep calm and carry on.