How NORAD Began Tracking Santa

For more than 50 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s flight.

The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations "hotline."

One day in December, Colonel Harry Shoup's phone rang, and on the other end was a small voice that just asked:

"Is this Santa Claus?"

The straight-laced and disciplined Shoup was initially annoyed and upset by the call, thinking it a joke. But when the little voice started crying, Harry realized that it wasn't a joke.

So he responded with some 'ho-ho-hos,' asking if he had been 'a good boy' and finally to speak with the boy's mother. And the mother got on and said:

'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.'

Harry looked it up, and there it was, his official phone number at CONAD. One after another, they had children calling in. So he put a couple of airmen on the phones and instructed them to act like Santa Claus.

It became something of an inside joke at the command center.

"The old man's really flipped his lid this time -- we're answering calls for Santa."

The airmen had this big glass map board of the United States and Canada, and used it to track airplanes through the region. On Christmas Eve, 1955, Harry walked in to find a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole. Taking inspiration from this joke, he called the radio station:

"This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh."

After that, radio stations began calling in every hour, asking for updates on Santa's current location.

Later in life, he got letters from all over the world, with people thanking him for his good-natured sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information.

"It's probably the thing he was proudest of," his children would later report.