Nickelodeon "10/16/05" Incident

During an airing of 'SpongeBob SquarePants' on October 16th, 2005, numerous viewers, from children to adults, were witnesses of a series of abnormalities that ranged from confusing to disturbing. Prior to the broadcast, Nickelodeon was airing their programming as usual, with shows like 'Rugrats' and 'Jimmy Neutron' having no technical issues to note. 
It was when the SpongeBob Season 3 episode 'SpongeBob Meets The Strangler' begun playing was where the issues began.
Viewers begun to notice several oddities happen, including audio skipping, jittery footage and scenes skipping. Some viewers would rewind the episode to capture evidence of the instances happening. Many had assumed these were merely technical difficulties, as these types of things would sometimes happen to other channels. One abnormality, however, would end up debunking this.
During the scene where The Strangler had grabbed Patrick, it began to jitter and repeat frames just like the few times before, but what happened next was something nobody could ever anticipate. The mouths and pupils of both The Strangler and SpongeBob disappeared, leaving them only with white voids in place of their eyes.
The scene would flicker between that and normal as it started to play out again, before suddenly cutting to black after showing a close up of Patrick. After a few seconds of dark, an technical difficulties screen appeared that lasted the remainder of the episode until cutting to commercial break.
'Pranks-A-Lot' soon played afterwards, and outside of audio skips and a few instances of jittering footage the episode played out at normal. Normal until the credits, however. The credits text would flicker briefly before disappearing entirely, the audio muted halfway through and would remain missing even when the logos appeared. The 'United Plankton Pictures' logo was missing, only showing the water background.
Then there was the 'Nicktoons' logo. The orange splat was missing the 'Nicktoons' text, and the copyright text was also missing. Some viewers were able to make out some hidden imagery, including a pair of eyes and the text "We'll be right back." in between them.
Viewers would turn to message forums like 'SpongeBuddy Mania' to discuss the incident and providing evidence. Rumors were spread of varying believability, but the most accepted one was that it was the result of a hacking attempt. Viacom and Nickelodeon were silent about the incident, most likely to avoid appearing in headlines.
Any evidence of it existing were lost in time, unfortunately, outside of the two screenshots provided. But perhaps it'll resurface one day? After all, they can't keep us silent forever. They can try all they want, but the world will know what happened.
We'll be right back…
Category:Nickelodeon
Category:SpongeBob
Category:Hijackings