For those of you who are unsure about what we have been doing in the past hour, we would like to tell you that we have not gone mad, and that we are simply in the holiday spirits.
The Santa Tracker, for those who do not know about this, came out of an accident in 1955. During that year’s Christmas season, a Colorado Springs Sears department store registered for a phone number, and printed them on newspaper advertisements to encourage children to call Santa Claus through this line.
Unfortunately, the wrong number was printed, and the number printed was actually a line to the Director of Operations of the then Continental Air Defense (CONAD, which would later become North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD). After the director at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, asked parents of children callers about what happened, he ordered his staff to give out Santa’s position to any other callers.
Thus, a uniquely North American tradition began, and is still alive and well in the present day, where major media outlets also report on Santa sightings during their news hours.
An interesting tidbit of trivia before we update you on Santa’s whereabouts: during the Cold War period, these updates were given via radio, and only North America was covered by the trackers. The trackers, unsure of the identities of those on board the “flight”, would scramble fighters (as the story goes) to shoot down the flight! Of course, the identity of those on board was soon established, and Santa flies through North America free and clear.
At the present moment, through our Santa tracker on Google Earth, we have established that Santa has returned to South America, and is now at the nation of Guyana, after delivering goods in Venezuela. Temperature at Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, is at 75F.
We will keep you up to date and up to speed.
NOTE: Earlier versions of this post listed the original year that the Sears Phone ad error occurred as 1951. The correct year is 1955.
