It’s Christmas Eve which means many children are eagerly waiting for Santa to come down the chimney tonight and deliver their present. But for the children who want to stay up at the hopes of seeing the man himself, tracking Santa’s journey through the night seems like the best way to catch him.
Thanks to technology, a quick search and you have a range of Santa trackers to choose from. But did you know the tradition predates these websites? In fact, it began 69 years ago.
In early December 1955, the phone rang at an air base in Colorado Springs, a time where tensions were running high during the Cold War.
The Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) director of operations Colonel Harry Shoup answered the phone.
“Is this Santa Claus?” A child’s voice asked on the other end.
Shoup initially, and understandably, thought it was a prank, replying, “I’m the commander of the Combat Alert Center. Who’s this?”
The child then began to cry and ask if he was one of “Santa’s helpers”. The colonel then played along, replying he was indeed Santa Claus with a convincing “ho-ho-ho”.
This kickstarted a nearly 70-year tradition, with a phone line opened and answered by volunteers, eventually evolving into a live tracker online. It is now run by CONAD’s successor, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).
But how did a child manage to get in contact with a colonel in the US air force? Well, the American department store Sears had printed an advert in a local newspaper telling children they could call Santa. But it turns out they had printed one digit wrong.
Colonel Shoup asked for a new phone number after he realised what had happened. But whilst the phone at CONAD continued to ring, Colonel Shoup told his staff they were to answer the calls as Santa Claus.
On Christmas Eve that year, a map writer had drawn a picture of a sleigh on plexiglass which was used to mark where unidentified flying objects were located.
Colonel Shoup then called the local radio station saying, “This is Colonel Shoup, the commander of the Combat Alert Center in Colorado Springs. And we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh”.
NORAD now have a website and a phone centre for children to phone in and track Santa. Brigadier General Jocelyn Schermerhorn, a senior US military officer in Canada, told Sky News about what it looks like on Christmas Eve.
“We have about a thousand people come together to set up the operations centre that is used to track Santa and that allows anyone to call in to check on his whereabouts.”
In 2022, 78,000 calls were answered at Peterson Space Force Base.
You can watch NORAD’s Santa Tracker tonight here.