O.J. Simpson’s Freeway Chase: What Happened to the White Ford Bronco

No need for speed: One of the most-watched live television events was also the slowest moving. On the evening of Friday, June 17, 1994, a white Ford Bronco with California plate 3DHY503 traveled down southern California’s freeways driven by former football player Al Cowlings. In the backseat: O.J. Simpson, the football legend known as “The Juice,” who reportedly had a gun to his own head.

Nearly 100 million people tuned into the live chase

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The Man Who Named Cyberspace - An interview with William Gibson

August 4, 1994

"The world is really so surreal these days that it’s necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. But I think it then becomes one of the artist’s functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are.

“We have these moments spontaneously - I think of them as CNN moments. The last one I had, probably most people had, was watching that weirdly Ballardian slow-motion freeway pursuit (of O.J. Simpson). Which was on every channel. That’s as strange as it gets.”