This week, Montana television station KRTV was overtaken by some sort of pirate signal, that triggered an Emergency Alert System announcement of a zombie attack during the "Steve Wilkos Show." Gawker reported this week that the station then released this statement:

"Someone apparently hacked into the Emergency Alert System and announced on KRTV and the CW that 'dead bodies are rising from their graves' in several Montana counties. This message did not originate from KRTV, and there is no emergency. Our engineers are investigating to determine what happened and if it affected other media outlets."

WGXC's "Saturday Morning Serial" at 7 a.m. Feb. 16 will tune in this disruption, and also the infamous "Max Headroom" pirate television broadcasts in Chicago in the 1980s, and others. Plus, pirate television songs from the Talking Heads and more.

UPDATE: At least three other stations have had similar incidents, Radio World reports.


"The Mining Journal in Marquette, Mich. reports the “zombie” bogus alerts aired on two television stations in the Upper Peninsula as well: WNMU(TV) and WBUP(TV)," Radio World reports, also writing that a Utah station engineer claims to have stopped another attempt. "One engineer in Salt Lake City said on the SBE EAS Listserv he headed off such an attack: 'There was no record of anything received on the box (CAP or legacy) but there was a transmission about bodies rising from the grave under a CEM header. I headed it off before any of our main channel stations aired it but it did auto-forward to our HD2 channels, as such an ‘emergency’ should have.'"