As they do every Christmas Eve, the U.S. and Canadian armies activated a joint tracking effort on Wednesday to follow the route of the sleigh of Santa Claus, a 70-year-old Christmas tradition that was born out of a curious mistake in the middle of the Cold War.
It was December 1955 when the red phone rang unexpectedly in the bunker of the then U.S. Continental Air Defense Command (Conad) in Colorado.
Picking it up, Colonel Harry Shoup received not an alert about an impending nuclear attack, but the voice of a child who asked in complete innocence, “Is Santa Claus there?” Far from breaking his illusion, Shoup played along with a “Ho, ho, ho.”
The origin of that misunderstanding can be traced back to a Sears department store advertisement in a local Colorado newspaper, which invited children to call Santa Claus, but mistakenly the number listed was Conad.
That Christmas, Shoup received hundreds of calls from children and decided to organize a volunteer center so that children could call to find out the whereabouts of Santa Claus and his reindeer sleigh.
Keeping with tradition in the digital age
Seven decades later, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), heir to the old Conad, continues the tradition and tracks Santa Claus’ footsteps every Christmas Eve.
Santa first visits New Zealand and Australia, where it gets dark earlier, and then continues through Asia, Africa and Europe to finish in America.
So that the youngest members of the family can follow his journey in real time, every year Norad sets up the website www.noradsanta.org with a map where Santa and his reindeer can be seen jumping from country to country.
The site, available in nine languages – English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean – also indicates how many minutes are left until the stop and includes a counter with the millions of gifts distributed.
Children can also phone Norad, where some 1,000 U.S. and Canadian volunteers answer questions about Santa’s location and origins.
Last year, about 380,000 calls rang in at Peterson AFB in the city of Colorado Springs, Norad’s headquarters.
One of the most frequently asked questions is what happens if the children are awake when Santa arrives.
The answer is blunt: “Santa Claus only delivers gifts to children who are asleep.”
The tradition is so ingrained that U.S. President Donald Trump plans to join the volunteers and take calls with children across the country, just as some of his predecessors have done.
Where is Santa Claus?
Norad says it uses the same systems to verify the location of Santa’s sleigh that it uses in its regular operations.
Including the Northern Alert System, a long-range radar network covering northern Canada and Alaska that allows the sled to be detected as soon as it takes off from the North Pole.
This is in addition to infrared satellite detection, capable of identifying Rudolph the reindeer’s nose, which emits a heat signal comparable to that of a missile.
As well as visual confirmations from fighter jets when Santa enters U.S. airspace.
Despite this monitoring, Santa is fully authorized to take to the skies.
So recalled the Pentagon in 2024, amid the mass hysteria triggered by a wave of bizarre drone sightings in New Jersey.
Authorities then asked the public to check to see if what they were seeing was not simply Santa’s sleigh before alerting the FBI.
“If you see red and green lights in the sky, it’s probably it. Be aware that it is an authorized flying object,” the Department of Defense said.
Filed Under: Where is Santa Claus
With information from EFE
