#broadcasthistory

On the morning of February 20th 1971 millions of Americans were enjoying what was shaping up to look like a totally normal day. People woke up, ate breakfast, and made their way to their daily obligations of school or a job expecting nothing out of the ordinary. One of the many adults spending that morning at work was Wayland S. Eberhardt, a civilian teletype operator with the National Emergency Warning Center at Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado. One of Eberhardt’s routine tasks was to run scheduled tests from the Emergency Broadcast System. It was a task that had been completed many times by the fifteen-year veteran of Cheyenne Mountain but on that February morning a simple mistake brought the entire county to its knees in a matter of seconds.

An Emergency Broadcast System broadcaster

Founded in 1963, the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) was designed to transmit an Emergency Action Notification (EAN) across both television and radio which would allow the government to quickly reach the American people should an unspeakable situation arise. In the event of an emergency, an EAN was to be initiated by the National Emergency Warning Center located at Cheyenne Mountain and using teletype tape a message would be sent to Telex machines located in every broadcast station in the country that was part of the EBS. Each of these messages was accompanied by a code word that had to be looked up in a book or verified against a list of words inside a sealed envelope to ensure that it was genuine. These code words changed daily and the EBS was tested twice a week at specifically scheduled times to assure preparedness. On February 20th 1971 at 9:33 A.M. Eberhardt fed a tape into a teletype transmitter sending a message to 5,000 radio and 800 television stations across the United States. The problem was that he fed the wrong tape into the machines, one that told everyone to brace not for a test, but for news of an actual emergency.

All over the nation broadcast station Telex machines rang out bell sounds warning that an EBS message was coming. The words on the paper chilled those who read it to the bone:

“MESSAGE AUTHENTICATOR: HATEFULNESS/HATEFULNESS

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ACTION NOTIFICATION (EAN) DIRECTED BY THE PRESIDENT. NORMAL BROADCASTING WILL CEASE IMMEDIATELY. ALL STATIONS WILL BROADCAST EAN MESSAGE ONE PRECEDED BY THE ATTENTION SIGNAL, PER FCC RULES. ONLY STATIONS HOLDING NDEA MAY STAY ON AIR IN ACCORD WITH THEIR STATE EBS PLAN.

BROADCAST EAN MESSAGE ONE.

MESSAGE AUTHENTICATOR: HATEFULNESS/HATEFULNESS

20 FEB”

The EBS message received by stations, code word “Hatefulness” 

Undoubtedly made even more sinister by the code word of that day, “Hatefulness”, the message sent the readers into a state of panic as they quickly clamored to verify the term to make sure that this was definitely not a drill. When the code word was authenticated the fear became widespread. David Skinner, the news director of WEVA in Emporia, Virginia later told a reporter: “I thought I was going to have a heart attack trying to open that damned envelope. I haven’t felt that way since John Kennedy was killed.” Another station manager later said he and his coworkers felt as if they were experiencing the attack on Pearl Harbor all over again. Even though the code words matched there was still some confusion, was it a coincidence that the EBS warning happened to come out at the same time as the scheduled test? Some argued that if it was an actual emergency the bells that warned of the incoming message were supposed to ring more times than they had that morning. Other stations could not locate their lists to authenticate the code word and others simply refused to go off the air as instructed. Broadcasters and listeners waited together in fear wondering what could have happened that was serious enough to trigger a real warning from the EBS. Where was the President with his message? Were we at war? Was there an unavoidable nuclear attack on the horizon? In a country that was still dealing with the looming threat of the Cold War anything seemed possible.

   Panic was also running wild at Cheyenne Mountain where people were desperately trying to get the word out that the emergency message was in fact a mistake. A new message was sent out telling stations to ignore the previous warning:

THIS IS THE NATIONAL WARNING CENTER – CANCEL EAN TAPE SENT AT 9:33 EST

However, the cancellation message was also supposed to have a code word to verify it and without that code word, “impish”, the warning was to be ignored. At 9:59 A.M. the National Emergency Warning Center tried sending another message to ignore the warning and decided to use the code word “hatefulness” again. Since this was the same code word found in the original warning the stations again ignored the message. Finally, at 10:13 A.M., nearly forty minutes after the crippling EBS message went out, a new message containing the correct code was sent:

“MESSAGE AUTHENTICATOR: IMPISH/IMPISH

CANCEL MESSAGE SENT AT 09:33EST REPEAT CANCEL MESSAGE SENT AT 09:33EST

MESSAGE AUTHENTICATOR: IMPISH/IMPISH

20 FEB 10:13EST”

A failed attempt to cancel the warning using “Hatefulness” a second time

The country gave out a collective sigh of relief, waited for their nerves to calm, and returned to their day. Secretary of State Melvin Laird stated that there would be an investigation of what caused the false alarm and the Pentagon released a statement saying:

“The Office of Civil Defense is currently investigating the circumstances surrounding the transmittal of the erroneous message. The National Emergency Warning System is located within the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain complex but is not a NORAD function. It is operated by the the U.S. Army’s Strategic Communications Command. This is a civil defense action and not a military one.”

As for the crew in Cheyenne Mountain, Eberhardt was severely shaken up by his mistake and later told newspapers that he genuinely did not know how he accidently fed that message into the machine. The chief of the National Emergency Warning Center did not fire Eberhardt, but took the entire episode as evidence that he had to find a way to make the system foolproof. His solution? To move the actual emergency message tapes away from their location next to the transmitter and seal them in envelopes inside a nearby cabinet. It proved to be a simple and effective solution.

Newspaper headline reporting that Eberhardt would not be punished for his mistake