Channel One

Remember before TV was all digital? It wasn't that long ago but many people seem to have either forgot about it or not have known all of the details. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have noticed if it wasn't for my parent's large antenna in the backyard. As a child, it seemed huge, nearly as big as a house. My dad was a TV-addict and his job allowed him to afford whatever expense for his addiction. I remember there was a TV in every room of the house, and I think we had every channel we could get.

Ironically, I never was much into television. Usually the TV in my room would be on Channel 4 for my Nintendo and that would be it, occasionally going onto Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon when I was bored.

There were 120 channels on the dial of my TV. Because of the placement of the channels, it was easier to go backward to get to the channels that I would want to watch rather than going forward. It was an older television cabinet. It was in our living room, but since dad had upgraded to a 42 inch CRT I had it in my bedroom. I was appreciative but it had a lot of what I called "ghost channels". I'm not exactly sure why there were there, but there was a handful of channels that never came in quite right. Maybe the signal wasn't quite there, or maybe it had something to do with how it was connected. Most of them were just static where you could just barely hear talking, but never quite make out what it was saying. Occasionally I remember hearing a commercial I recognized. Almost every channel from 80 to 120 was one of these ghost channels. I started getting actual TV around channel 80 again, but Nickelodeon was 78 so a lot of the time I'd hear that static as I turned that dial.

But one of the stranger ones was one I called "Channel One". The dial I had didn't have a channel one labeled. It went from 2 right around to 120. However, there was an audible click in between them, and it was just complete static. The other ghost channels would have an actual channel trying to push through the static, but channel one wasn't a ghost channel, it was just a dead channel. No sounds of talking, no picture forming, nothing like the others. None of the other televisions in our house even had a channel one. It was pretty strange to me why they would just start with 2 so at the time it made sense to me that there would be a channel one. In some strange child-like empathy, I always felt sad that it was ignored.

But rarely there would be... something on channel one. I remembered the very first time it happened. It was summer and I was on vacation from school, I was watching Nickelodeon until Nick-at-Nite came on. I didn't really want to watch a "Grandma Show" so I had started turning the dial to play a game. I was going past the channels when I noticed an old black-and-white program flicker right before I reached channel 4. As I said, there would be times where the other channels would have something on them, but never channel one, and I could have sworn that's where I seen it. I slowly clicked one back bit by bit until I got to that empty space. Sure enough, something was there.

I don't remember any of the exact details at the time. I was fairly young and a bit confused, and my grasp on all the 'grown-up' language was pretty limited. I remember an older man, black suit and tie, reading a sheet of paper and speaking into a microphone with a fairly bland background. His voice seemed distinguished, and educated. At first glance, it was obvious he was a newscaster, but the things he said that didn't make any sense to me at the time, but now I vaguely remember (or at least imagine) it was talking about something with World War II. I vaguely remember him talking about the Pearl Harbor attack and evacuations of civilians in areas that might be targets. It was fairly serious sounding and I recall being fascinated and confused. About 2 minutes into it, the signal faded back into the empty static.

I wouldn't say the event creeped me out, but it intrigued me. I became a fascinated with channel one and wanted to see what else I could get to come on. I sat there watching the static for an hour but nothing happened. Disappointed, and almost lulled into sleep with that white noise, I went to bed defeated. However, that moment made me obsessed seeing something else on this secret channel. When I was bored and didn't feel like playing video games, I would turn the TV on channel one just to see if anything else would pop up. It drove my parents crazy to have me listening to static most of the time, to the point where they would demand that I either change the channel or turn it off, threatening to take the TV away if I didn't. Humorously, I remember getting "the talk" from my father because though I stumbled on the scrambled porn channel, only to find out that wasn't the case.

But despite these threats, I intently watched, most times with the sound turned down just enough that I could hear it. Eventually, my efforts paid off. There were four more incidents of something coming up on channel one after that day that I remember seeing that strange newscast. These events were a week or two apart, at completely random times of the day. Each of these only lasted for a minute or two before they faded away.

The first one that I saw was a cartoon of all things. Through the faint static, there was an image of a sun that was breathing fire on the land, causing the water to dry up and the plants to die in cartoonish way. There was no voice acting, only a narrator that talked over the entire thing. From what I could tell, there was a Native-American village that was dying from the heat of the sun. An Native American boy tried to give animals water but all that was left was a drop. After a bit, the whole thing faded into static.

The second time was the news man again, this time talking about a rather terrible story of a young girl who was murdered in a park somewhere in California. He made brief mention of the scene, of how her body was discovered in two different locations, though the details were vague. He made mention of a police investigation not turning much of anything.

The third one was what seemed like an old weather report. I remember a gentleman talking about how the cold weather was great for the season. I honestly don't remember much of them because I believe this one came in at 3am, and I only caught it due to the static cutting out and waking me from a dream. This one might have been a dream itself.

The last was rather disturbing and different from anything else I ever seen. It was some older man in a nice outfit and a monocle looking thing, with some very creepy looking people. They had distorted skulls, long faces and slits for eyes. I don't remember seeing noses or mouths, but their skin was leathery and disgusting looking. As a child, this vision scared me out to the point I remember running up and turning off the TV. I ran into my parent's bedroom crying, trying to explain what I just saw but they didn't believe anything I said about channel one. They played it off as it was static and my eyes were playing tricks on me. But since then, I had always gone the long way around that dial, making sure I stayed away from channel one as much as possible.

Fortunately, I didn't use that TV for much longer as I had gotten new TV for Christmas, as well as a Super Nintendo. The old TV was still in my room due to it being fairly useful as desk to put the new TV on top of. Besides, that TV cabinet was roughly 600lbs and my parents had no desire to try to drag that thing out of my room. For a long time, the TV just went unused and channel one was completely out of my mind at this point

It wasn't until 2007 until that TV would be used again. I had inherited dad's flat-screen TV from his room after he got an upgrade. It was nice but it only had composite cables, no plugs for an RF adapter. By this time Analog on televisions was being phased out for digital so there was less and less need for those coaxial cables. It didn't really bother me, because every other console I had supported it, outside of my old Nintendo and Super Nintendo.

But one day, I just had this urge to play Mega Man 2. I had Wily Stage 1 stuck in my head and I could not get it out. I felt a need to revisit my past. I just plugged in the TV cabinet and plugged in the Nintendo. It was simple because the old Nintendo RF adapter as well as the antenna cable was already in the back since I had no desire to move the heavy TV to unplug it even after all these years. However, since we had moved onto cable, the only channels that were coming in were the analog channels everyone could get with rabbit ears. The Antenna in our back yard was still functional, so the quality of the signals were fairly good.

Curiosity consumed me as I browsed through the channel to see what we were still getting, I turned it to channel one. On first glance, it was nothing but static, but there was something different in this static than it was all the other dead channels. There was a strange, constant sound coming through. It was hard to explain. It sound like someone was talking underwater. Every couple of seconds, a extremely high pitched sound would come in and slowly fade, like the sound your ears makes when they are ringing.

I intently watched for a good minute, trying to make out what was going on, and as I did, I could see the video ever so faintly through the static. In my mind's eye, it was the news reporter, with the paper and microphone as I had seen about 20 years before. The signal grew stronger it became easier to make out and eventually I was treated to a fuzzy picture like those I've seen before.

But something was deformed with his face. I could not make it in any sort of detail, but it looked disproportionate. His head was large, I'd say roughly one-and-a-half times the size of a normal human and it had a shiny, rubber texture to it. His lips were barely moving and the eye sockets seemed dark and empty. It was as if he was wearing a cartoonish mask of himself. His movements were exaggerated, his head bobbing up and down repeatedly as he talked, moving the papers in exaggerated motions as he flipped through them. It seemed like as if someone was imitating a caricature of the reporter, like a parody or Satire. As he spoke, the strange reverse glubbing and harsh static coming through.

It was then I noticed the other proportions. His hands were dangling like skin was hanging off the bone and had no real muscle structure to it, bending and folding nearly flat at some points, his pinky not moving at all. His limbs seemed unusually long, with his forearms disappearing behind the desk and his arms sloping all the way down. He looked at the camera and you could see these strange looking eyes just gazing right at you. His head suddenly twitched and shook violently, before static had overtaken the signal.

I was enthralled, but frightened. My hand was still on the dial, frozen. I wasn't quite sure if what I was seeing was happening or if it was my mind playing tricks on me and I was just seeing things through the black and white static. I remember exhaling violently as I had forgotten to take a breath the entire time that was going on. Maybe I just witnessed something and took it out of context. Hell, maybe I just imagined the entire thing.

But just as I started to calm down and change the channel. I heard a voice that had been lost to my memory, it was the reporter. There was no image available, just static, and the voice was faint and barely intelligible from the noise. I had turned the volume up full blast just to make out what he was saying, for some reason feeling like he could explain what I just saw.

His words were broken, with at least a second's worth of pause between them. But even 7 years later after hearing it, I remember it to this day clearly to this day.

"Good Morning...Danger...Killing...Everyone...Earth... Time...20...29...Everyone...Evacuate....20...29...Everyone...Dead...Signing off..."

Then the signal just cut out completely. Normally, there is a small fade to static, but this time, almost immediately after the last word, was just loud static. I was frightened, sickened at what just occurred.

I had let it stay on for over an hour with the loud static just to see if I could hear anything else... but nothing came up. I left it on for days, weeks, months. I had bought a DVD recorder to record when I slept and while I was at work. But that was the last time I heard anything from channel one. For almost a year of my life, I had spent hours with both Televisions on. One watching what I missed and one watching what might yet to be. I dreamed in static. My entire life was consumed by this television.

But there was nothing.

My parents became so concerned that they sent me to a psychiatrist to "explain" it to me, saying I had some sort of psychotic episode from stress. He eventually ordered me to take the TVs out of my room and I couldn't watch television unsupervised. That was the last time I had seen or heard anything from channel one.

But I know what I have seen and heard from that channel. I'm not crazy.

I had spent time looking up what might have happened, searching forums, doing research, anything. The most common explanation I got was that some of the old TV waves are sent out to space, and often times they come back. That explains why I might have seen those old shows, but I never got a good explanation on what I saw that day.

Every now and then I desperately want to see what's on channel one to hear any messages that might have been left out there, like some twisted obsession. But analog TVs are a thing of the past, and it might be impossible now. I just want to know if there were any other messages meant for us, things we might have missed. Did we stop broadcasting that something beyond our comprehension would not see our fingerprints? Or maybe they stopped so that people like you or I would not stumble upon the messages given to us by someone else.