Out of the ashes of offensive ineptitude, the 1982 Harvard football team found the end zone for the first time in three years against Yale.

And out of the dying sod of Harvard Stadium, an MIT-planted prank stole the show and avenged years of on-field football absence at the 99th playing of The Game.

Midway through the second quarter, a giant balloon began to grow out of the ground near mid-field, halting play and eventually capturing national headlines. At the time, WBZ-TV sportscaster Bob Lobel said it was perhaps the greatest college prank of all time. The Boston Globe’s Michael Madden agreed, calling it “the prank of pranks”, while footage of the event was broadcast nationally on CBS. This year’s Harvard-Yale game marks the twentieth anniversary of the MIT prank, an event burned in the memories of those who witnessed it as well as in Harvard-Yale Game lore.

The plot’s origins date back 40 years to when a group from MIT’s Delta Kappa Epsilon (Dekes) fraternity planted explosive cords, developed for use by demolition experts in WWII, in hopes of blasting the school’s initials into the sod before the Harvard-Yale game that year. The grounds crew discovered the explosives and school officials expelled the students involved soon after.

Undeterred, the Dekes tried again in 1978, this time developing a device that would spray-paint “MIT” in the field. Once again luck was not in their favor as a group of Brown students burnt a “B” onto the Harvard Stadium turf with lye a few weeks before the planned prank.

Grounds crew members repairing the sod discovered the device and The Game went on without incident.

But the third time was the charm for the Dekes of MIT, who replaced luck with planning, developing this “hack” for nearly two years. The device was constructed using various instruments donated by MIT laboratories, a vacuum motor, and Freon gas. All these ingredients were directed towards inflating a larger-than-life balloon emblazoned with the school’s initials and earmarked for the 1982 Harvard-Yale football game.

Once built, the most difficult task was burying it under the sod of Harvard Stadium and concealing it from the vigilant grounds crew. Over the course of eight nighttime visits, complete with lookouts and camouflage, the Dekes were able to run wires underground through a gap in the cement track that once rounded the field, and then into the bowels of the concrete horseshoe where the power supply was located. Given their poor luck with security, the MIT students waited until the week of the game to install the fire extinguisher-size device into the ground and hoped the sod would not die before the game.

At a news conference held a week after the game, one of the pranksters reflected, “Our last worry was that the piece of sod would die and there’d be a brown square on the field. It was like a heart transplant operation—at all costs, keep the grass alive!”

The day of the game, of course, was not without complications. News that the Beavers’ band was planning to sneak onto the field and form the letters “M-I-T” forced the Dekes to move up their planned halftime ignition. So with 7:45 remaining in the first half, the ground began to shake. The field was clearing after Harvard’s second score when a nozzle burrowed its way out of the turf near midfield and began to inflate a large black balloon. The crowd stood in quiet awe while both teams retreated wearily from the minivan-sized globe.

On its surface read “MIT”, and after a few minutes the balloon suddenly popped and as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

Yet people did not quickly forget what they had seen. After the game, then-University President Derek Bok said to The Crimson, “I sat there and didn’t really know what to think. I thought the Phoenix was again rising from the ashes....I thought I had seen it all.”

On a break from the nationally televised Ohio State-Michigan game, highlights of the “bubble”/“blob”/“thing” were broadcast across the country. Local newscasters hailed it as the best practical joke of all time, while the Dekes just saw it as success.

Of course, this story does not tell the full tale about MIT’s Harvard-Yale game hacks. In 1990 a group of MIT students set off a rocket buried at the goal line that spread a banner with the letters “MIT” through the uprights as Yale prepared to kick a field goal. After that game, which Harvard went on to lose 34-19, a head and leg cast appeared on the statue of John Harvard along with notes from the MIT conspirators.

Yet none of those efforts match the notoriety of the 1982 MIT balloon, which twenty years ago this month set a new standard for football tomfoolery and earned the headline, “MIT 1, Harvard-Yale 0.”

—Staff writer Renzo Weber can be reached at rweber@fas.harvard.edu