NORAD’s Santa Tracker is enjoyed by children and their families all over the world. My own children love tracking Santa each Christmas Eve and seeing which city he’ll stop at next. This wonderful tool began back in 1955, but believe it or not it was all because of a typo.
Sears had placed an ad in the newspaper encouraging children to call Santa Claus at the North Pole, only the number didn’t ring at the North Pole, it accidentally rang at the desk of Col. Harry Shoup’s secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, now known as NORAD.
At first, Col. Shoup was annoyed by the first phone call thinking it was a joke. A child on the other end was looking for Santa Claus, and Col. Shoup had work to do. However, after realizing it wasn’t a joke and that the child was sincere, his heart changed. He asked the child if they had been good, what they wanted for Christmas and tried to play the part of Santa the best he could. He soon found the Sears ad with the typo for himself, and decided to keep up with the game the best he could.
Multiple calls started piling in, and he began putting other airmen on the lines to act like Santa. It started to be a big joke at the command center, and so when Col. Shoup walked in on Christmas Eve and looked at the large glass board that tracked flights, he was met with a large drawing of Santa, his sleigh and eight reindeer coming over the North Pole. The airmen apologized, saying it was just a joke and asked if he wanted it taken down. According to his daughter Terri, they were surprised to hear Col. Shoup call the local radio station and say, ”This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ After that the radio stations would call every hour asking ”Where’s Santa now?”
From then on, hundreds of volunteers from Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Base would help each Christmas Eve, until the Santa Tracker was launched via it’s own website in 1997.
The rest, they say, is history! You can track Santa for yourself this Christmas Eve by visiting noradsanta.org
