Tracking Santa

In this episode - Tracking Santa . . .

This Christmas Eve, people worldwide will download the NORAD Tracks Santa Claus app from iTunes or Google Play to follow his progress through U.S. military radar. This all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup’s secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.

The story has it a young boy dialed the unlisted phone number of the Air Defense Command Operations Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, believing he was calling Santa Claus after dialing a number from a promotional Sears ad in a local newspaper. The commander on duty that night, Colonel Shoup, quickly realized the mistake and assured the youngster that Air Command would guarantee Santa a safe journey from the North Pole.

“So asked him, “Have you been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ The mother got on and said, ‘Have you seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ He looked it up, and there it was his classified phone number. That night Air Command had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

Since then, the NORAD Tracks Santa Web Site receives nearly fifteen million unique visitors from more than 200 countries and territories around the world. Volunteers receive more than 130,000 calls to the NORAD Tracks Santa hotline from children around the globe.

For more information about NORAD Tracks Santa, visit www.noradsanta.org.

Excuse me, I need to download that app.

I'm Patrick Ball; thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

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