Then-Associate Dean of Freshmen W.C. Burriss Young '55 told The Crimson in 1993 that former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace escaped an angry crowd at the Law School in 1968 through the tunnels.

Author Jane Langton, in her 1978 The Memorial Hall Murder, says Henry A. Kissinger '50 avoided an anti-war protest by leaving the Law School through the tunnels after a Vietnam-era speech.

Fox says he thinks former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara might be a more likely candidate.

Young also said in 1993 that former Harvard Police Chief Robert Tonis, while serving as an FBI agent in 1939, lost track of a suspected Nazi spy when he disappeared into the tunnels through a River House.

Neither Lichten nor Hawkes would confirm that the tunnels had ever been used to move VIPs between buildings, but both agreed that such a move would be possible.

"It's possible to take someone from building-to-building through the tunnels, but it hasn't been done recently," Hawkes says. "I've heard the stories."

Rumors also abound about student forays into the tunnel system-currently illegal outside of WHRB radio personnel who use tunnel wiring with official permission.

Tunneling stories usually begin in first-year dorms, where tunnel doors are often more accessible than in upper class Houses.

"We just went exploring a couple times," says a junior in Winthrop House of his first-year tunnel experiences. "The funny moment came when we realized we were tripping alarms all along the way-which we realized 15 minutes after the first alarm.

"There's a big vent by Canaday, and we climbed up there and were watching people walk by."

A sophomore in Pforzheimer says she made it to the basement of Canaday Hall through the tunnels last year, and returned with a haul of comfortable chairs for her room.

As of this summer, Hawkes says all of the tunnel doors are alarmed, with the alarms registering in a 24-hour central engineering control room deep under the Science Center.

Alarms tripped at night mean a call to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), with an engineer meeting an HUPD officer near the alarm site and descending into the tunnels.

Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III says that students have been caught in the tunnels in the past, but that students illegally enter them "rarely, and certainly not recently."

"We take [students' entering the tunnels] very seriously," Epps says. "I don't suggest that anyone try."