Ken Hechtman
- See also Wikipedia's article about "Ken Hechtman".
Ken Hechtman was a student at Columbia in the 1980s. He was effectively expelled in 1987 for keeping uranium-238 he found in the basement of Pupin in his dorm room.
He is known, among other things, for being the leader of the Allied Destructive Hackers Of Columbia (ADHOC), a group which wrought havoc on campus infrastructure, particularly the tunnels. He and fellow ADHOC member Jeff Bankoff conducted amateur chemistry experiments, creating hallucinagens and, perhaps, explosive devices in their rooms.
Of his experiments with uranium, Hechtman said that he wanted to "possibly expose plant seeds to it under a radiation shield and plant them and get weird mutation". The Blue and White theorized that he had actually stolen the uranium, however, to test the radioactivity of caffeine he had ingested from the same Pupin storage area.
Hechtman is also rumored to have caused a campus blackout, to have stolen all Columbia freshmen's SAT scores, and to have been the first person to scale the Low Library roof.
When he was caught with uranium, Hechtman was suspended for a year and expelled from campus housing. His friends within ADHOC quickly deserted him. He dropped out after deciding that returning to campus as a pariah wasn't such a good idea.
Since graduating, he has been an anarchist squatter on the Lower East Side, broke into the Yucca Mountain reservation in Nevada, and was present at the execution of Timothy McVeigh. In 2001, Hechtman made the news again after he was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan while reporting for a Canadian newspaper.
He has returned to college and is currently a computer science student at McGill University.
