Residents of Orange County, California were started when an ominous TV broadcast interrupted the regular scheduled programming to predict the end of the world. Stacy Laflamme lives in Lake Forest and said she was watching the HGTV channel through Cox Communications when around 11:05 a.m. the emergency alert began flashing across her screen. Next there was an eerie voice delivering an even scarier message, "Realize this, extremely violent times will come."
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The garbled voice of a man boomed from residents TV speakers. Laflamme described the broadcast, "It almost sounded like Hitler talking. It sounded like a radio broadcast coming through the television." Cox cable customers weren't the only to receive the ominous message, Spectrum cable subscribers also got the alert. Another woman, Erin Mireles of Diamond Bar, was watching the Bravo channel through Spectrum's cable service when her show was also interrupted by the flashing warning. "I was definitely startled, ’cause the volume increased exponentially," Mireles said. "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." The strange message drew attention on social media, one person filmed the eerie broadcast and shared it online. A spokesman from Cox, Joe Camero, explained the strange broadcast as an error due to one or more radio stations conducting an emergency yest.
Camero said the cable systems sometimes pick up extra signals when it should have just been a normal emergency-broadcast test. Camero went on to say, "With these tests, an emergency tone is sent out to initiate the test. After the tone is transmitted, another tone is sent to end the message. It appears that the radio station (or stations) did not transmit the end tone to complete the test." That is when the broadcast picked up an audio feed that bled into the alert according to Camero. He reiterated, "We don’t want to alarm anyone with any false emergency alerts." Another spokesman, Dennis Johnson from Spectrum, said "We have confirmed that we were fed an incorrect audio file." It sure seems like an odd thing to broadcast 'accidentally' coinciding with an emergency alert.
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