Tracking Santa Claus for 68 Years: A US-Canada Military Agency

Washington: For decades, the US-Canada joint military surveillance organization has tracked Santa’s travels over the Christmas season, assisting kids worldwide in learning when his present-filled, reindeer-driven sleigh is expected to arrive in their town.

Users may click to discover more about the many cities along Santa Claus’s fictitious global distribution route, shown in a 3-D interactive website at www.noradsanta.org.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, created the Santa tracker in 1955 when a Colorado newspaper ad misdirected youngsters to the military nerve center’s hotline instead of printing a phone number to link them with Santa.

Colonel Harry Shoup, the NORAD director of operations at the time, instructed his team to check the radar to see where Old Saint Nick may be and to notify the kids on his whereabouts in order to prevent disappointing the small ones.

68 years later, NORAD is still keeping up the custom of operating a makeshift phone center out of its Colorado headquarters to address urgent inquiries from kids.

A Facebook image shared by the organization showed rows of individuals taking phone calls; some were dressed in military, while others had red Santa hats on.

A few prominent US figures participated in the holiday festivities, including President Joe Biden and his spouse Jill Biden.

“This evening, the President and First Lady participated in the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa tracking calls with children and families across the country,” the White House stated in a press release.

Children in the Pacific area were unaware of the tracker’s precise location earlier on Sunday due to a brief outage.

“Hi there, SantaTrackers! Even though our monitoring map is experiencing a few technical issues, #Santa is still in the air! “He is going to Fiji next!” the team behind the tracker said on Facebook, then an hour later, they announced a repair.

The International Space Station, which circles the Earth, was Father Christmas’s first extraordinary visit, according to NORAD.

Along with transiting Israel, the reindeer-drawn sleigh was reportedly seen circling Africa, crossing over southern Gaza, and traveling south to Palmer Station, an Antarctic research site.

Santa then made his way up through South America in the direction of the United States, according to the tracker, dropping down over 100,000 gifts per second, or roughly 4.9 billion gifts in total as of Monday at 1:30 PM GMT.
When not spreading Christmas happiness, NORAD carries out control and warning operations for the aerospace and marine industries. One of its responsibilities is keeping an eye out for missile launches from North Korea, which is something that Santa Claus may be thinking about this year because the most recent ICBM test was just a few days ago.