Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
MIT STRIKES AGAIN Hack Brightens The Game By Charles H. Ball News Office The headline in The Boston Herald read: MIT 1--Harvard-Yale 1 A sub-head said: "Tech Pranksters Steal the Show" The Boston Globe began its game story this way: "Perhaps the best way to explain Harvard's frustration in yesterday's 107th game against Yale in Harvard Stadium is to say that the students of MIT made it into the end zone before the Crimson offense." All of which is to say that MIT hackers once again played a starring role in the fabled Harvard-Yale football game. This time, in the words of The Tech, with eight minutes and 56 seconds remaining in the third quarter, "a rocket erupted from the sod at the zero yard line, shooting over the goalpost an 8 1/2 by 3 1/2 foot banner with the letters 'MIT' on both sides." According to the student newspaper, police then spent several minutes tugging at the banner, trying to disentangle it from the goal post. Three members of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity claimed responsibility for The Hack, which is becoming almost as traditional as The Game. As with its predecessors, the hack was brought off through a combination of engineering skill, daring cat-and-mouse games with Harvard's campus police and nighttime forays into Harvard Stadium. The Tech identified the fraternity trio as seniors Praveen P. Tipirneni and Andrew M. Heafitz and graduate student Christopher M. Mayer. "We put a mechanism in the ground at approximately the zero-yard line with a rocket engine that shoots a banner over the horizontal bar of the goalpost," Tipirneni told The Tech. "The mechanism was activated by about 480 feet of wire that ran underneath the field and connected with two metal bleachers of the stadium." Ultimately, the wires also ran under the sleeves of Heafitz, who detonated the rocket at an "appropriate time" with a battery pack he carried in the inner pocket of his jacket. Tipirneni said the hack, tested at a local high school field, survived a setback in mid-October when Harvard workers discovered the wires and removed the entire apparatus from the ground. No real problem. Despite increased vigilance by Harvard police, the hackers again penetrated the stadium under cover of darkness and again laid the wires and planted the apparatus, this time with a bit more elegance to make detection more difficult, they said. The rocket went off just as Yale was about to kick a field goal in a game whose outcome was no longer in doubt. According to the Globe, the backfield judge "went running for cover" just as the Yale kicker, Ed Perks, was about to attempt a 34-yard field goal. "I was still kind of laughing when we did get set the second time," said Perks. "Every year we try to figure out what they're going to try to do this time. I tried to wipe the smile off my face and get down to business." The "rude interruption," as the Globe put it, turned out to be too much. The kick sailed wide. "Smoke got in his eyes," said the Herald. There was never much doubt about what was happening from the moment the rocket exploded. "It's those naughty boys from MIT," said 82-year-old Charlie Dale over the press-box microphone, according to the Herald. He might have been thinking of the now-famous 1982 hack, when MIT students inflated a weather balloon on the field during the game. Not everyone enjoyed this year's sideshow. The Yale coach, Carmen Cozza, said, "Someday somebody's going to get hurt, and that's not funny." Harvard coach Joe Restic, perhaps more accustomed to his MIT neighbors, was more sanguine. "I knew something was going to happen," he told the Herald. "It always does. The pranks don't bother me. I think that's part of college football."