Tag Archives: North American Aerospace Defense Command
Santa Claus is coming to town, and this tracking agency can tell you when!
The joint US-Canadian military monitoring agency has continued its decades-long tradition of tracking Santa’s whereabouts, helping children around the globe find out when his reindeer-powered, present-filled sleigh is coming to town. A 3-D, interactive website at www.noradsanta.org showed Santa and his reindeer on their imagined worldwide delivery route, allowing users to click and learn more about the various cities along the way. The Santa tracker presented by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) dates to 1955, when a Colorado newspaper advertisement printed a phone number to connect children with Santa but mistakenly directed them to the hotline for the military nerve center. more, >>click to read<< 13:51
A child calling Santa reached NORAD instead. Christmas Eve was never the same.
Col. Harry Shoup was a real by-the-book guy. At home, his two daughters were limited to phone calls of no more than three minutes (monitored by an egg timer) and were automatically grounded if they missed curfew by even a minute. At work, during his 28-year Air Force career, the decorated fighter pilot was known as a no-nonsense commander and stickler for rules. Which makes what happened that day in 1955 even more of a Christmas miracle. It was a December day in Colorado Springs when the phone rang on Col. Shoup’s desk. Not the black phone, the red phone. “When that phone rang, it was a big deal,” said Shoup’s daughter, Terri Van Keuren, 69, a retiree in Castle Rock, Colo. “It was the middle of the Cold War and that phone meant bad news.” >click to read<19:54
