Santa Claus in the Pentagon’s crosshairs: 70 years tracking his sleigh due to a mistake

Washington.- As every Christmas Eve, the armies of the United States and Canada activated this Wednesday a joint tracking to follow the route of Santa Claus’s sleigh, a Christmas tradition that is already 70 years old and that was born from a curious mistake in the middle of the Cold War. It was December 1955 when the red phone unexpectedly rang in the bunker of the then Continental Air Defense Command of the United States (Conad) in Colorado. Upon answering the phone, Colonel Harry Shoup didn’t receive an alert about an imminent nuclear attack, but rather the voice of a child who asked with complete innocence: “Is Santa Claus there?”. Far from shattering the illusion, Shoup played along with a “Ho, ho, ho”. The origin of that misunderstanding dates back to an advertisement by the Sears department store in a local Colorado newspaper, which invited children to call Santa Claus but by mistake the number that appeared was that of the Conad. That Christmas, Shoup received hundreds of children’s calls and decided to organize a volunteer center so that the little ones could call to find out about the whereabouts of Santa Claus and his sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Follow Tradition in the Digital Age

Seven decades later, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), heir to the former Conad, follows the tradition and tracks Santa Claus’s movements every Christmas Eve, who first visits New Zealand and Australia, where night falls first, and then continues through Asia, Africa and Europe to finish in America.

So that the little ones in the house can follow his journey in real time, Norad enables the website www.noradsanta.org every year with a map where you can see Santa and his reindeer jumping from country to country.

The site, available in nine languages —English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—, also indicates how many minutes are left until the stop and includes a counter with the millions of gifts distributed. Children can also call the Norad by phone, where about 1,000 American and Canadian volunteers answer their questions about Santa Claus’s location and origins.

Last year, around 380,000 calls rang at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, the headquarters of Norad.

One of the most frequent questions is what happens if the children are awake when Santa arrives. The answer is blunt: “Santa Claus only delivers gifts to children who are asleep”. The tradition is so ingrained that U.S. President Donald Trump plans to join volunteers and take calls with children from all over the country, just as some of his predecessors have done.

Military Technology at the Service of Magic

Norad assures that to verify the location of Santa’s sleigh, it uses the same systems it employs in its usual operations, including the North Warning System, a network of long-range radars that covers northern Canada and Alaska and that allows detecting the sleigh as soon as it takes off from the North Pole.

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In addition to this is infrared satellite detection, capable of identifying Rudolph the reindeer’s nose, which emits a heat signal comparable to that of a missile, as well as visual confirmations from fighter jets when Santa enters North American airspace. Despite this tracking, Santa has full authorization to fly through the skies. This is how the Pentagon recalled it in 2024, amidst the collective hysteria caused by a wave of strange drone sightings in New Jersey. The authorities then asked the population to, before alerting the FBI, check if what they were seeing was not simply Santa’s sleigh. “If you see red and green lights in the sky, it’s probably him. Note that it is an authorized flying object,” noted the Department of Defense.