Vrillon: The Broadcast That Hijacked Britain’s Imagination

It was a typical Saturday in late November 1977. Across the south of England, families were returning home from the shops or the football, dinner was being prepared and the TV was warming up for shows like The Generation Game, Morecambe & Wise, Doctor Who, and Starsky & Hutch. But as the evening news played on Southern Television, something strange began to happen. The comforting voice of the newsreader faded – replaced by a distorted, otherworldly tone. It was the voice of Vrillon.

What viewers heard next shook them to the very core. For nearly six minutes, Vrillon, who claimed to be a representative of Ashtar Galactic Command commandeered the airwaves with a very real, unnerving and utterly baffling transmission. Was it a perplexingly playful prank or a peculiar planetary prowler?

What became known as the Southern Television broadcast interruption would go on to become one of Britain’s oddest and most enduring television mysteries – a real-life moment when science fiction seemed to spill through the screen. But who was behind the voice? How did they do it? And what message, if any, were they trying to send?

Here’s a look back at the night a message from who-knows-where interrupted tea-time television and sent Britain into a television-inspired spin. Tune in, because this story is out of this world.

On Saturday, November 26, 1977, viewers in parts of southern England saw their television screens flicker and the instantly-recognisable voice of newsreader Andrew Gardner suddenly faded away. The interruption occurred during Southern Television’s early‑evening news bulletin on the ITV network, which was being broadcast from the Hannington transmitter on Cottington Hill in Hampshire. At exactly 5.10pm, the regular audio feed was overridden by a deep buzzing noise, and then a slow, metallic voice introduced itself as Vrillon, a representative of Ashtar Galactic Command.

For almost six minutes, Vrillon’s message, albeit incredibly unnerving, was one of benevolent peace, warning humanity against false prophets and its destructive ways, to remove ‘weapons of evil’ before it’s too late, and urging spiritual awakening as Earth passes into the New Age of Aquarius. Viewers listened in stunned disbelief as the rambling message, delivered in a calm, almost serene way, mixed New Age language with apocalyptic warnings.

The now-famous Southern Television broadcast interruption affected thousands of viewers, and when engineers regained control, normal service resumed at the start of a Merrie Melodies cartoon called The Goofy Gophers. There was no immediate explanation from ITV which left audiences – many of whom were having their dinner – to wonder whether they had just witnessed a sophisticated hoax, a genuine broadcast fault, or a message from outer space. Like the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion almost exactly a decade later, no-one quite knew what to make of it.

When the scheduled broadcast resumed, Southern Television didn’t immediately acknowledge that anything unusual had taken place, although later in the evening they referred to the incident as a ‘breakthrough in sound’. Viewers were left to process Vrillon’s message on their own, many wondering whether they had misheard the broadcast or experienced some kind of technical glitch on their own TV set. Within minutes, confusion turned into action. People across Hampshire, Berkshire and the wider Southern Television region began calling friends and family to ask if they had heard the same thing.

As the evening went on, phone lines started to jam. Some viewers called Southern Television directly to report the strange message, while others rang the police or even the Independent Broadcasting Authority to find out what on (or off) Earth was going on. A number of callers were reportedly frightened or deeply unsettled, particularly those who had caught only some of the message and were unsure whether it was a hoax or something more sinister. Inside Southern Television, engineers and staff scrambled to work out what had happened.

In today’s digital age, broadcasters can transmit from the studio, via satellites or fibre-optic cables to every home, but it wasn’t always this way. In the analogue era, signals were sent to major transmitting stations, which then relayed the programmes over a wider area via smaller rebroadcast or ‘relay’ transmitters. In this case, the key site was the Hannington transmitter in Hampshire, which picked up Southern’s feed off‑air from another main transmitter (the Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight) and then rebroadcast it to viewers in the south of England. This created a potential weak point – if someone could overpower the studio signal at the relay stage, they could effectively step into the chain and broadcast in its place.

Investigators later concluded that this was almost certainly what happened. The Vrillon transmission is believed to have been made by a powerful transmitter, located somewhere within range of Hannington, which broadcast on the same frequency as Southern’s incoming signal but at a slightly stronger level. By capturing the receiver at Hannington, the pirate signal replaced the original audio while leaving the video untouched, which is why Andrew Gardner remained on screen even as Vrillon’s Ashtar Galactic Command message left families across southern England flummoxed.

The feat would have required specialist equipment, a good understanding of broadcast engineering and a suitable line‑of‑sight location, suggesting that whoever pulled it off was more than a casual prankster with a home aerial. The Independent Broadcasting Authority stated that ‘it would take a considerable amount of technical know-how’ to do what they did.

In the days that followed, the Southern Television broadcast interruption went from ‘weird voice on the telly’ to a national and even global headline. Local and national newspapers reported on the story, often playing up the sci‑fi angle and quoting bewildered viewers. Some outlets treated it as a humorous prank, framing Vrillon’s message from Ashtar Galactic Command as an elaborate joke, while others adopted a more sober tone, stressing that authorities were taking the matter seriously and looking into a possible breach of broadcasting regulations. This mix of amusing scepticism and genuine unease helped the story spread – even as far as American newspapers – cementing it as one of the most unusual media moments of the decade.

Southern Television tried to strike a balance between reassurance and responsibility. The company issued statements explaining its engineers had been investigating the source of the interference, and emphasising that there was no danger to viewers, just an unauthorised audio override. The broadcast regulatory bodies rightly condemned the incident, saying that hijacking a signal in this way was a criminal offence. Yet for all the officialdom, no-one was ever identified or arrested. With every news story the lack of answers grew, turning the Vrillon message from local disruption into international broadcasting mystery.

Over the years, the most widely accepted theory is that the Vrillon message was the work of technically skilled pranksters, most likely radio or television enthusiasts, and the fact that only the audio was affected, and that the interruption lasted for several minutes without completely crashing the signal, suggests a carefully planned operation rather than a random glitch or kids mucking about. Whoever was behind it would’ve needed access to a reasonably powerful transmitter, knowledge of the correct frequency, and a clear line of sight to the relay – pointing many researchers and amateur sleuths toward well‑equipped hobbyists or insiders familiar with broadcast engineering.

Other theories push the story firmly into the realm of the paranormal and conspiratorial. Some argue the message was a genuine broadcast from Ashtar Galactic Command, suggesting its content – warnings about war, nuclear weapons and humanity’s future – is clear evidence of an extraterrestrial intervention. This theory has a grain of plausibility in that, unlike the Max Headroom incident – which was an incoherent, disjointed ramble full of bizarre jokes, childlike silliness and lewd punchlines – this was played with a completely straight bat, without, it seems, any desire for fame or publicity. There were no threats, just a message of peaceful intent, despite the way in which it was delivered.

A few fringe ideas hint at secret government experiments or clandestine psychological operations, though no evidence of any kind has ever surfaced to suggest this might be true. In the absence of an obvious culprit or confession, the Southern Television broadcast interruption continues to sit in an unusual grey area for incidents of this kind – technically explainable, yet never officially solved.

Nearly half a century on, the Vrillon broadcast remains an unresolved wrinkle in Britain’s television history. Whether an audacious hoax, an illegal hack, or a fleeting brush with the unexplained, it remains a moment when the familiar glow of the TV set seemed to open a doorway to something far stranger.