NORAD Tracking Santa Once Again Across the World

Brockville – Once again, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) is once again tracking Santa Claus as he leaves the North Pole and travels around the world on his mission to deliver presents to children on Christmas Eve.

Santa took off from the North Pole seven hours ago, according to NORAD. The actual Santa-tracking starts at midnight annually on December 24. It is a community outreach function of NORAD, and has been held annually since 1955.

Currently, (As of 2:00 pm) NORAD has tracked Santa flying over Saudi Arabia.

You can follow the tracking of Santa here: https://www.noradsanta.org/en/map

On December 24, 1948, the United States Air Force issued a communique claiming that an “early warning radar net to the north” had detected “one unidentified sleigh, powered by eight reindeer, at 14,000 feet, heading 180 degrees.” The Associated Press passed this “report” along to the general public. It was the first time that the United States Armed Forces tracked Santa Claus’ sleigh on Christmas Eve, though it was a one-time event, not repeated over the next several years.

Then, in 1955, a Sears department store placed an advertisement in the Colorado Springs newspaper, The Gazette, which told children they could place a call to Santa Claus and included the number ME 2-6681. One digit was misprinted; this number was actually a number for Colorado Springs’ Continental Air Defence Command (CONAD) Center.

According to interviews, in December 1955, a call allegedly came through to CONAD. Colonel Harry Shoup answered the call. The caller, a little girl, asked Shoup if he was Santa Claus. Shoup, a serious man, initially thought the call to be a practical joke and responded gruffly. Upon realizing the child was serious, he softened his tone and asked to speak to the child’s mother; it was then that he learned of the advertisement. Some sources assert that he received numerous similar calls that night, in response to which he had his operators give children the “current location” for Santa Claus. The Atlantic claims to the contrary that there were not many calls from children that night.

On Christmas Eve, when a member of Shoup’s staff placed a picture of Santa on a board used to track unidentified aircraft that December, Shoup saw a public relations opportunity for CONAD. He asked CONAD’s public affairs officer, Colonel Barney Oldfield, to inform the press that CONAD was tracking Santa’s sleigh. In his release to the press, Oldfield added that “CONAD, Army, Navy, and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S. against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas.”

Over the following years, the legend of how the annual event originated began to change. By 1961, Shoup’s version of the story was that he had not been gruff with the child but instead had identified himself as Santa Claus when he spoke to the child on the phone. Shoup and his family later modified the story further, adding that the child had dialed the “red telephone”—an impossibility, because the hotline was connected with the Strategic Air Command by an enclosed cable, and no one could dial in from the outside—rather than the regular phone on Shoup’s desk, that it was a misprint in an advertisement that led the child to call him rather than the child misdialing the number, and that a flood of calls had come in from children on Christmas Eve 1955 rather than from just one child on November 30.

Shoup did not intend to repeat the stunt in 1956, but Oldfield informed him that the Associated Press and United Press International were awaiting reports that CONAD again was claiming to be tracking Santa Claus. Shoup agreed that Oldfield should announce it again, and the annual tradition was born.

In 1958, the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) took over the reporting responsibility from CONAD, and the reporting became more elaborate as the years passed. On December 24, 1960, for example, NORAD’s northern command post at Saint-Hubert, Quebec, Canada, provided regular updates of a supposed sleigh operated by “S. Claus” which it identified as “undoubtedly friendly”. During the evening, NORAD claimed that the sleigh had made an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay, where Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) interceptor aircraft claimed to have been sent to investigate a supposedly discovered Santa bandaging his reindeer Dancer’s front foot, after which the RCAF planes were said to have escorted him when he resumed his journey.

Eventually, NORAD, which was renamed the North American Aerospace Defence Command in 1981, openly published a hotline number for the general public to call to get updates on Santa Claus’ supposed progress.

To track Santa, please visit: https://www.noradsanta.org/en/map