Since the 1950s NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) has been tracking Santa Claus’ progress. According to legend, it started by accident. A Sears department store placed an advertisement in the Colorado Springs newspaper, which told children they could place a call to Santa Claus and included the number. One digit was misprinted and the calls started coming in to NORAD’s predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center. Colonel Harry Shoup, who was a crew commander on duty, answered the first call and supposedly told his staff to give all children who called in later a made-up "current location" for Santa Claus. When a member of Shoup's staff placed a picture of Santa on a board used to track unidentified aircraft that December, Shoup saw a public relations opportunity. The agency began annually supplying radio and television stations tapes that could be played on December 24 giving “official US government tracking data” as to Santa’s location. The tape photographed here is from our archives and was sent to Council Bluffs station KSWI or KRCB; the date is unknown.
A quick bit of history… the North American Air Defense Command was born out of the Cold War, created in 1957 as an early warning for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) retaliatory forces. The recording makes reference to “the DEW line.” The Distant Early Warning line was a system of 63 radar stations in the northern Arctic region of Canada to detect incoming bombers of the Soviet Union. The system went operational in 1957 and was mostly shut down by the early 1960s.
If you care to listen to the tape just click the arrow below; the complete recording is about eleven minutes.
