SAUGUS — The holiday season is officially over, and many people will try to go into the New Year with a clean slate. This also includes one Saugus relic that was literally cleaned up for the 2025 season.
Ferdi the cow sits atop the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Forbes Family Cafe in the Ray and Maria Stata Center, looking over all the students who enter as part of a hack museum display.
“Hacks, in the Institute parlance, are pranks or practical jokes that demonstrate the cleverness and engineering prowess of the people who execute them,” according to MIT’s museum website.
The hack collection has grown over the years. This includes Ferdi the cow, the campus police car that found itself sitting on the Great Dome, and a set of bouncy balls that were a part of the 1,994 ball deluge that poured down on the class of 1994 as they took their Freshmen group photo.
One student, Mike Heaney, who was a part of the Hilltop cow hack, has since documented the night on his website.
The frat had stolen the cow and let it sit in its basement. However, it was starting to take up too much space. So, on Halloween night in 1979, the frat created a plan to move the cow to the Great Dome.
“The cow did make its way to the basement – next to the pool table – but it turns out that a cow big enough to see from the highway was enormous when put indoors. After just a few days, the consensus was that having it in the basement was not so cool anymore, and we needed to get rid of it,” Aaron Bobick, another student who took part in the hack, wrote on Heaney’s website.
Getting the cow to the top of the Dome was no easy feat. It included Heaney and Bobick climbing through a duct so they could pull the cow up the building. The students at the bottom had the job of securing the cow with rope. The bigger problem came when it was time to get down.
“It was past midnight, the Barker Engineering Library had closed, and the building’s 10 elevators had stopped running. So, we rappelled down the elevator shaft and dropped into the elevator,” Heaney wrote.
There, the two students were met with campus police and would have a meeting with the police chief the next morning.
Though the cow was quickly removed from the Great Dome and returned to the Hilltop, MIT would soon receive the cow once again to place inside the hack collection.
Now, Ferdi continues to reside on campus with a graduation cap on its head as part of MIT’s great hack history.
