December 25, 2017 • 34 mins
The story that circulates about how NORAD started tracking Santa is pretty heart-warming, but doesn’t completely hold up. So there’s some myth-busting here, and maybe the tiniest bit of bah-humbug.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, Merry
Christmas to listeners who are celebrating indeed, or I mean,
(00:21):
if you aren't celebrating, you just want to be wished
Merry Christmas. Today's episode is coming out on December twenty,
so it seems like a good time to talk about
a very Christmas related listener request, which is how the
North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD started tracking Santa
Claus on Christmas Eve every year. This is something that
(00:43):
we've gotten several requests for, including from Elaine and Tori.
And at one point last year or the year before,
I asked on our Facebook page for people to suggest
holiday ideas and somebody suggested this one, and a lot
of people were like, I would like that please, m mmmmmm.
So here we are. So this whole story that circulates
about how NORAD started tracking Santa is pretty heartwarming, but
(01:06):
it doesn't a hundred percent hold up. So there's a
little bit of myth busting here and maybe just the tiniest,
piniest bit of bo humbug me just a little what
you're telling me. It didn't start with Jack Skellington and
his attempt to take over Christmas. No, but that would
be line. Does that make sense? He was a threat.
(01:28):
They had to start watching him, and then they were like,
let's do it every year. That's my version. I like
your version. So a note to parents on this one.
If your kids eagerly awaited St Nick's arrival this year,
then today's show is probably a little bit more mature
and candid than they'll really enjoy, So we would recommend
saving it for later or giving it an advanced listen
(01:48):
on your own to decide whether your kids would enjoy
hearing it before sharing it with them. The story of
NORAD's annual Santa Tracking really begins not with Jack Skellington,
but with the Cold War. After the end of World
War Two, the United States increasingly felt the need to
prepare a defense against a potential Soviet attack. Lots of
(02:10):
different projects and programs were related to this basic idea,
but when it comes to Norad, the worry was of
a direct attack by Soviet bombers reaching US soil. That
meant that the nation was looking for a way to
detect such an attack when it was still far enough
away to intercept before anyone came to harm. At first,
this task fell to the Air Defense Command, which divided
(02:31):
the responsibility up among different Air Force commands around the country.
Each command was responsible for protecting a different part of
US territory, but by the nineteen fifties, with fears of
a Soviet attack continuing to escalate, the United States created
a unified command to oversee protection of the entire nation.
This was the Continental Air Defense Command or CONNAD. KANAD
(02:55):
was a multi service command, combining the Army, Navy, and
Air Force, but the Air Force still did a lot
of the heavy lifting. Condents efforts combined long range radar
systems which would provide advanced notice of an incoming attack,
with aircraft capable of intercepting that attack once it was detected.
So it was basically like a trip wire made out
(03:15):
of radar, and if anything tripped the wire, the Air
Force could respond quickly and aggressively. Eventually, the United States
military came to the conclusion that it was not enough
to focus just on the United States in this effort,
not when there was a neighbor to the north that
would almost certainly be flown over in the event of
a Soviet attack. Since Canada shared the United States fears
(03:37):
about the possibility of such an attack, it made a
lot of sense for the two nations to work together.
The US and Canada had been at least to some extent,
sharing domestic defense plans since the nineteen forties. In the fifties,
they began signing defense agreements related to expanding this long
range radar capability into Canadian territory. This coopera Asian kept
(04:00):
growing until the establishment of NORAD or the North American
Air Defense Command, which was the successor to CONNAD, on
September twel NORAD was initially headquartered at an Air Force
base in Colorado Springs, which was home to the US
Continental Air Defense Command and the US Air Force Air
Defense Command. General Earl Partridge of the U s Air Force,
(04:23):
previously commander of both KANNAD and the Air Defense Command,
became commander of NORAD, and he was joined by Deputy
Commander Air Marshal Roy Sleiman from the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Although the treaty allows for the NORAD commander to be
Canadian or American, and it's a requirement for the commander
and deputy commander to be from different countries. Traditionally, the
(04:45):
commander has been American and the deputy commander has been Canadian.
After expensive debate and a fair amount of controversy, the
formal treaty that came to be known as the NORAD
Agreement was signed on May twelfth. It provided the framework
for how the two countries, governments and militaries would cooperate
in the realm of air defense. NORAD's headquarters had actually
(05:08):
moved a couple of times since it was established. First
in the nineteen sixties, it moved from end to Air
Force Base to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado. This
is the massive underground complex of buildings constructed under a
literal mountain, designed to be able to survive virtually any
attack or disaster. This facility has actually made its way
(05:29):
into popular culture through depictions like the nineteen eighties three
movie War Games, the TV series Stargate, and the fictional
Crystal Peak, California in Terminator three, which is very clearly
patterned after Cheyenne Mountain. Is so very clearly patterned after
Hyenne Mountain that I in the years that have intervened
since seeing that movie conflated them in my head, and
(05:50):
when working out this podcast was like, oh wait, that
was a different place. In two thousand six, nora ADS
day to day operations were moved to Peterson Air Force
Base and Passo County near Colorado Springs, with the Cheyenne
Mountain Facility continuing to work as nora ADS alternative command center.
The nora AD Agreement itself has also been reviewed and
(06:10):
revised several times since it was originally signed. Since nineteen
fifty eight, the agreement has been renewed nine times, including
four major revisions which took place in nineteen seventy five,
nine six, and two thousand six. The shift from air
defense to aerospace defense as it's known today came along
(06:30):
in nineteen eight one as well. The primary missions of
nora AD under the two thousand six renewal are aerospace warning,
aerospace control, and maritime warning for all of North America,
and there are a lot of different potential threats that
are looped into these three primary missions, including attacks by aircraft,
missiles or space vehicles, drug trafficking and other illegal activity
(06:53):
carried out by air, and nuclear attacks delivered by strategic
ballistic missile, cruise, missile or long range aircraft AFT. The
maritime warning component also relates to both nations internal waterways
and the maritime approaches to both countries. So after getting
through all of this, it may seem a little weird
for NORAD, the binational Cold War era entity, once headquartered
(07:17):
in a sophisticated bunker complex under an impenetrable mountain, which
is responsible for detecting long range threats to North America
by air, water, and outer space, to track Santa Claus.
It does sort of seem like an awful lot after all,
at least in terms of international military defense. Santa Claus
is not a threat, and there's no mention of Santa
(07:38):
at all in the NORAD agreement. So we're going to
talk about how this all came to be after a
quick sponsor break, and if somehow you still have very
young listeners with you after having gotten through all of
that air defense talk, uh, it really might be a
good time to find another activity for them. NORAD's tracking
(08:03):
of Santa is often compared to the September editorial in
The New York Sun That is the same paper that
published the Great Moon Hoax in eight thirty five editorial
ran under the headline is there a Santa Claus? More
commonly known today as Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa
Claus thanks to its later reprintings in children's book form.
(08:26):
It started with a letter by Virginia O'Hanlon, daughter of
coroner's assistant Dr. Philip O'Hanlon. She had written to The
New York Sun earlier that summer quote, Dear editor, I
am eight years old. Some of my friends say there
is no Santa Claus. Papa says, if you see it
in the Sun, it's so. Please tell me the truth.
(08:46):
Is there a Santa Claus. Virginia had intended for her
letter to go into The Sun's Q and A column,
Notes and Queries, but it went unanswered. I just need
to take a minute to note the irony. Uh, if
you see it in the Sun, it's so. When the
Sun published the Great Moon Hoax, it's sort of beautiful.
(09:11):
I mean, did you not know that that was not
a hoax? Those those bad people live on the moon.
Definitely lunar beavers anyway, So young Virginia Handlon anxiously awaited
for her letter to be answered. It was not until
weeks later when the paper published an editorial response by
(09:32):
Francis parcelist Church, and it began, quote, Virginia, your little
friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism
of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see.
They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible
by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be
men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours.
(09:55):
Man is a mere insect, an aunt in his intellect
as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured
by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole truth of
truth and knowledge. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
We won't read the whole thing. It goes on, but
it ends no Santa Claus. Thank God, he lives, and
(10:19):
he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia named
ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue
to make glad the heart of childhood. Although this editorial
is often remembered as an immediate, instantly beloved success that
became an annual tradition right from the beginning, the Sun
(10:39):
didn't actually print it again until nineteen o two, and
then again in nineteen o six. Between nineteen o seven
and nineteen seventeen, it was printed six more times, and
The Sun started reprinting it annually in the nineteen twenties.
The story of the Yes Virginia article and that of
Norad tracking Santa do have some similarities. Both start with
(11:01):
an inquisitive child followed by the somewhat surprising response of
an adult, which then grows into something that's a ubiquitous
part of Christmas for a lot of people. We have
a lot more verifiable detail about Yes Virginia than we
do about nora AD's tracking of Santa. We know who
Virginia was and who her father was. We know who
wrote the column and when it was published. Although it
(11:22):
didn't originally carry a byline. Thanks to archived copies of
the newspaper itself, we know when it was reprinted and
when it wasn't, and we can see the newspaper's attitude
about these reprints shift over time, basically moving from well,
since you people are asking again, we will print this thing.
I guess two. Here is our beloved holiday classic. Please
(11:44):
enjoy it in the spirit of Christmas. And by comparison,
the Norad story is a sieve. The most popular version
goes like this. In Sears, Roebuck and Company ran an
ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and that ad
read quote, Hey, kitties, call me direct on my Marry
XMSS telephone. Just dial M E two dash six eight one. Kitties,
(12:10):
be sure and dial the correct number. Call me on
my private phone and I will talk to you personally anytime,
day or night, or come in and visit me at
Sears Toyland. And that was signed by Santa Claus. The
number actually appears into places Mary x miss morphs into
m E two one as well. Yeah, the Emmy and
(12:32):
Mary turn into the first two parts of the first
two letters of the exchange for the phone number. So
the most popular version of this story is that Emmy
two one was a typo connecting callers not to a
special Santa Claus call center at Sears, but to the
top secret red phone at CONAD headquarters, the one that
(12:53):
was a direct line to the Pentagon, known only to
top generals and the president. And this story when the
red phone started ringing off the hook, con AD staff
played along a number of stories. Uh and versions of
this telling also cite a specific person having answered that phone.
Colonel Harry Shout. Shout told the story himself in multiple
(13:15):
interviews over the years. In an interview that was recorded
towards the end of his life, he says that he
answered the red phone thinking that it was the Pentagon
or Colonel Partridge. When he realized that the collar was
not the Pentagon or Colonel Partridge, Shout thought that it
was someone on his staff playing some kind of prank
on him, and he did not appreciate it at all.
(13:37):
But then he realized that it was a child, a
little girl, trying to reach Santa, so he played along,
hearing the child's entire wish list and the fact their
house had a chimney, and her assurances that she would
leave food out for Santa and the reindeer. At least
in the portion of the interview that's publicly available, he
doesn't mention a misprint in an ad Shouts. Adult children
(13:59):
told this story a little bit differently in a story
Corps segment that appeared on Morning Edition in Pamela Farrell,
Terry Van Curen, and Rick Shoup, who would have been
about ten six and newly born when this all happened,
are in line with their father's version when it comes
to his being at first annoyed at this call, But
the way they tell it, the call was from a
(14:21):
boy whose mother eventually came on the line to tell
Shoup about the misprinted ad. In the Story Corps version,
the misprint meant that the boy's call was one of many,
so many that Shoup tasked two airmen with answering the phone.
Their Story Corp account goes on to include a moment
later that same Christmas season when one of the men
at Connad headquarters had drawn Santa's sleigh on the glass
(14:44):
board that was used to track aircraft, shop saw it,
and from that had the idea to tell a radio
station that Connad was tracking Santa on Christmas Eve. The
communication with the radio station probably came from Colonel Barney Oldfield,
the public relations officer, and not from Shoup directly. There
was indeed an Associated Press article on Christmas Eve nineteen
(15:08):
fifty five in which Knat assured Santa safe passage. The
article also someone alarmingly explains that US and Canadian forces
would be guarding Santa's flight from potential attack by Christmas haters.
It uses almost those words I don't remember the exact
wording that it uses, but it's basically like we're protecting
Santa from the enemies of Christmas using our armaments. I'm
(15:31):
gonna go with another Jack Skellington moment here. So it
seems pretty likely that there was a child who accidentally
called Kannat in nineteen fifty five, likely trying to dial
a number that was in an AD. There was a
December one, nine article in the Pasadena Independent with the
(15:52):
dateline of Colorado Springs, which reports that a youngster reversed
two digits of a number set up to answer queries
about Santa and instead reached KANNAD. Colonel Harry Shout is
quoted in this piece as having replied to this child quote,
there may be a guy called Santa Claus at the
north Pole, but he's not the one I worry about
coming from that direction. I also tried to find evidence
(16:15):
that this ad really did run in the Colorado Springs
Gazette in nineteen but the archive that I had access
to only goes back to nineteen sixty, by which point
Emmy two one was the phone number for a Colorado
Springs real estate agent Mary Listings. Everyone but even though
(16:37):
there is that likely grain of truth in the starting point,
this story has clearly blossomed and morphed a bit over
the years. In the earliest recorded accounts, the child reached
an unlisted number, not the Red phone, and since the
entire point of the Red Phone was to have a direct,
uninterruptible line between Kannad and the Pentagon, it would not
have even been connected to a public exchange where someone
(16:59):
could dial it by accident. It's also not all that
likely that an ad having a phone number in it
would contain the same typo in two different places. I mean,
I could see some scenarios where that would happen, but
it's more conceivable for a child who have fumble fingered
the phone number one time than for the number to
have been wrong in the ad twice and sparked an
(17:20):
avalanche of calls to Connad and the nay says. Of
the naysayers suggests that this ad was created and printed
by Connad sometime after to add support to this whole story,
or to kind of nod to the whole story that
it was not the like the ad. There's a picture
of the ad that circulates around. People are like that's
a mocked up ad. Yeah, it's like a retroactive folkloric
(17:45):
proof um. And though we do have the account of
Colonel Schaup and his grown children based on their childhood memories,
so far, there is no record of any person, or
certainly any hundreds of people coming forward to say that
they accidentally called hand in attempting to speak with Santa.
I want to make it super clear here that I
don't think the Shout family was like intentionally making anything up.
(18:09):
But when you tell the same story over and over
again for forty something years or however long, it gets
bigger over time, especially when you're like having to do
it in front of an audience. Well, and there's also
the telephone factor, by which I mean the game of
telephone were like. Because they were children when this all
(18:30):
went down, I'm sure that story was also told to
them by adults as part of like you know, the
family folklore, and those details probably got slippy along the way.
Many things contribute to that. I think we've all had
those family stories that are like that seems a little
different from the way I heard it twenty years ago,
but okay, no harmon are so. According to NORAD's own account,
(18:53):
By the time NORAD replaced con AD, the Santa the
Santa tracking was an annual tradition, and we're going to
talk more about how that developed and grew After another
quick sponsor break. Military efforts to do a little Christmas
pr by way of Santa Claus actually go back to
(19:14):
before Colonel Shop and the sears AD. For example, the
United States State Department Telegraph branch distributed a copy of
a radio grand that had been purportedly dispatched to Chris
Kringle at the North Pole on Christmas Eve of nineteen
forty eight. It said, in part, quote your coming mission
in connection with Operation Noel awaited with considerable interest by
(19:38):
Department reaction. Your visit expected to be one of joy
and goodwill to wide eyed children. The communic a then
went on to authorize Santa to communicate to all men
a quote united desire for peace on Earth, and it
authorized him to proceed down all chimneys, though quote you
are not repeat not to omit consideration of even the
(20:00):
smallest stalking. Apparently the State Department gets the Boss Santa around.
How does that chain of command even work? So? An
Air Force seasonal Communica that same year read quote our
early warning radar net to the north gives following spot
position report of object detect detected heading southerly direction, one
(20:24):
unidentified sleigh powered by eight reindeer at fourteen thousand feet
heading one degrees. Interceptors alerted and vector but unable contact.
Estimated time of arrival over targets December. So the combination
of the military and Santa predates Colonel Schaup and that
(20:45):
whole story, And according to a two thousand rite up
in Airmen Magazine, after that errand call or calls to
con AD in n con ADS, tracking of Santa became
an annual tradition pretty much immediately. A warding to this article,
in nineteen fifty six, public relations officer Colonel Barney Oldfield
(21:05):
asked Colonel Harry Shoup if they might set up a
special phone line for Santa inquiries after the wild success
of the previous year. Schoup actually didn't want to, but
the media had already gotten wind of this idea, including
visiting his home and getting his kids all excited about it,
so he begrudgingly agreed, and by the time Norad replaced
(21:26):
Khad a year later, this was an established tradition. Let's right,
out there was one of those things that was written
many many decades after this originally happened, and there is
some doubt about exactly how big a deal this was
in nineteen and nineteen fifty six. In August second nineteen
fifty six article on Colonel Shop in the Pittsburgh Press
(21:48):
is all about his public and media relations work on
behalf of the Military and Kannad. It's really focused on
an award that he was receiving for handling a jet
noise problem and Madison, Wisconsin. But it also mentions that
he was on See It Now with Edward R. Murrow,
and he had consulted on a short film called twenty
four Hour Alert starring Jack Webb, which was basically a
(22:11):
propaganda short for the Air Force. The Pittsburgh Press article
ends with Shops saying how important it is for urban
dwellers to quote feel themselves in league with and contributory
to air defense. But it makes no mention of Shaop
having had anything to do with Santa Claus or any
con AD program to track Santa. If that nine Christmas
(22:33):
had been such a success, with the nineteen fifty six
Santa hotline already in the works, it likely would have
been mentioned given the subject of the article. He was
being covered in the Pittsburgh Press. We should mention because
he actually grew up in nearby Bessemer, Pennsylvania. Yeah, so,
not only had Shop done a bunch of media slash
pr work for the military leading up to this point,
(22:56):
it seems really weird if the Conad Santa traditional is
already such a big deal that it would not have
come up in the context of what they were talking
about here, unless I wonder if they would have omitted
it in order to um protect the younger crowd. You
can't tell the story of how it came to be
without divulging some information. Sure that could make sense. I
(23:20):
still have doubts though anyway. I mean, that's once again
similar to how people remember in air quotes the New
York Suns Yes Virginia column as this instant classic, even
though it didn't become an annual feature for decades and
the Sun was actually kind of grudgingly doing it at first.
But it seems likely that Conrad Santa tracking programs had
(23:42):
kind of a lower and smaller start than the whole
hundreds of people called in nineteen fifty five. And we've
been doing it ever since. Uh progression, which is how
it has entered the popular understanding of all this. Norad
Santa Tracker was definitely reading by the nineteen sixties, though,
with Nora d producing and sending Vinyl records to radio
(24:05):
stations to play as scheduled Santa updates. On the b
sides were Christmas songs performed by the NORAD Commander's Band
that to me, is perhaps the most charming thing in
this entire episode. In the nine seventies and eighties, the
focus turned to TV, with similarly prerecorded Santa Status updates
that were replayed year after year. This is definitely what
(24:27):
I remember from my my childhood. I specifically remember the
warning that that ended with all children go to bed
immediately in a very stern voice. Uh. And there was
one year that like I needed to brush my teeth
or something, and I wasn't quite old enough to do
that on my own, and my mom was tidying in
(24:48):
the kitchen, and I was very distressed that Norad was
telling me I needed to go to bed immediately, but
like my mom was not available to brush my teeth.
I had a similar distress confusion concern because um, my
mother and I would go to midnight Mass usually, and
I was like, how can this be right? That this
(25:09):
is a thing we're supposed to do, but this is
the thing that the government is telling us to do.
It was conflicting directives that led to a little bit
of we were very stressy children. I think I think
we were. I was. I was. I'm still an anxious person.
I was definitely an anxious child, and I was very
worried that if I was not in bed on time
(25:30):
that Santa would come to our house. I would not
be in bed, we would not get any presents. Also
in this same era, in nineteen seventy one, NORAD spent
about three thousand dollars on a Norad Tracts Santa publicity film.
With the evolution of the Internet, Santa tracking has of
course become ever more complex, Starting with a partnership with
(25:50):
a o L in the Worldwide Web's early years, A
Santa Cam network was also launched in nine, which was
the Santa trackers first online here at this point, I mean,
really since the early years, this is unquestionably at least
as much about pr for Nora Ad and others as
it is about seasonal goodwill. There is merchandise you can buy.
(26:16):
There are corporate sponsorships which are reportedly what pays for
this today. Although I have some questions, Uh, Like it's
as a person who works at a job, it makes
sense that maybe the budget for the online Santa track
or website is coming through corporate partnerships, But like, are
the corporate partnerships paying for the jet takeoff that we're
(26:38):
going to talk about in a minute, How does that work? Uh?
But it's definitely regardless of who is actually paying for
all the things. It's a PR effort. There's a flashy
website and nora Ad and Santa, a winning combination was
awarded the Silver Anvil Award of Excellence for Reputation Management
(27:01):
and Brand Management by the Public Relations Society of America.
Is Santa getting a cut of any of this? That's
what I want to know. I have questions to um.
According to the PR s A site inn, nora Ad
saw six hundred sixty increase in website traffic because of
Santa Tracker publicity, along with a thirty increase in social
(27:24):
media traffic over just a month. This note ends with
quote because of the nora Ad Track Santa program, nora
Ad is a household name. Now more than ever, NORAD
is universally recognized as their premier authority monitoring the North
American skies. This is why a couple of years ago,
when people got really upset that there was a nora
Ad track Santa video in which there was a fighter
(27:47):
jet escorting Santa and his sleigh, people got like really
mad about the militarization of Christmas, and other people were like,
where have you been? This has been going on for
to gates. All of this radio and TV and online
work has also been accompanied by pictures and videos and
articles peppered through with references to all the high tech
(28:09):
military gear that NORAD says it's using to track Santa.
So the descriptions of the Santa tracker are also a
chance to sort of clue the public in on what
kind of technology NORAD has at its disposal for seventeen.
That includes NORAD's North Warning System, which is a collection
of forty seven radar installations in Canada and Alaska, along
(28:30):
with infrared satellites to detect Rudolph's news, and a worldwide
Santa Cam network that turns on the cameras about an
hour before Santa enters a country and then turns them
off again when he leaves, and Canadian NORAD pilots fly
CF eighteen fighter jets out of Newfoundland to welcome Santa
(28:52):
to North America. And this is where I'm like, does
the corporate sponsorship pay for that? And is it a
takeoff that's actually happening for real? That's the part that
I'm more inclined to question did that really happen? And
this is one of the ways that the Nora ad
st story really diverges from Yes Virginia. Yes Virginia is
all about how Santa is real, emphasizing imagination and faith
(29:15):
and the intangible, but not suggesting that he isn't in
the flesh human person that the writer himself personally met
at some point. Nor Add on the other hand, straight
up says that the fighter jet pilots of Intersect have
intercepted Santa a bunch of times, and that Santa always
waves because he likes to see the pilots today. The
(29:37):
nora Ad Track Santa website is in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese,
and Chinese. There are apps available to track him for
Apple and Google Play, as well as a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
and Instagram, on Star contracts Santa, and then there's a
nora Ad Track Santa Alexa skill. For a while, Google
(30:00):
Maps had an official partnership with nora And for the
Santa Tracker, but that partnership ended in and Google put
that work into its own Santa Tracker. And I read
an article that was like, I tried to get into
the bottom. I tried to get to the bottom of
what happened between nora Ad and Google. Was there a fight?
Was their drama somehow? No one really knows. Today, the
(30:22):
nora Ad Track Santa call center has more than a
thousand volunteers who answer calls every Christmas Eve. They the
volunteers average roughly forty calls an hour. It's usually a
two hour shift. They also answered questions via email, a
lot of kids calling and asking where Santa is uh,
questions pertaining Santa and presents and Christmas and things like that.
(30:47):
And it's clear that, regardless of the shakiness of the
origin story, Colonel schaup ended up loving the Norad Santa Tracker.
His children described it as a thing he was proudest
of in his career and after his retirement, he would
still help with Christmas Eve Santa tracking. Colonel Schaup died
on March fourteen, two thousand nine, at the age of nine.
(31:10):
And that is the history of why Nora ad tracts
Santa every year. Uh. I still have some questions that
some of which will never be answered. Yeah, I don't
think any of our questions will be answered. Do you
have any listener mail that we can answer questions or
reply to in our concrete way? So yes, this is uh.
(31:31):
This is from Rachel. It is about our recent six
Impossible episodes that was all listener requests, and it is
about the Great Window frog Fight. And I would like
to say that that episode came out yesterday afternoon, like
midlate afternoon Eastern time, yesterday afternoon. By nine o'clock this morning,
we had six emails about the frog fight. So clearly
(31:54):
the frog fight was the hit for that day. Uh,
And Rachel says, high ladies, I yearly jumped out of
my chair when in your most recent episode you covered
the frogs of Wyndham. I grew up in Willimantic and
frogs were everywhere in town. As you mentioned. There is
an operetta by uh By Burton Levitt called the frogs
(32:16):
of Windhom. Many organizations find a way to incorporate the
frog into their logos. The town has even done painted
frog sculptures, much like the painted scout the painted cow
sculptures in other towns. The image that you used of
the bridge represents a few things about Windom. The spool
of threat is from the American Thread Factory, a major
(32:36):
employer in town in the eighteen hundred to nineteen hundreds.
The frogs on them are I think of frog comments
of Puerto Rico, which represents the diversity in town. The
version of the story that I heard is that once
people heard the tale the tale, townsfolk were known as
the fools of Wyndham, and people would reply that they
were not from Windom, but from Willomantic. The county is
(32:56):
actually Windom County and contains the towns of North Windham's,
South Windom, Windom Center in Willomantic. Well Emantic is the
Algonquin term for the river. I was just so excited
that my hometown was covered in one of my favorite podcasts.
Thank you for all that you do and all the
interesting topics of conversation that you start tears. Rachel thank
you so much Rachel for this note. Uh. It has
(33:17):
always We've said before, so nice to hear from people who,
when we tell a story that's local to them, have
some personal local history slash flavor to share about it.
And I was not expecting the frog fight to be
nearly as popular in our email is it has been
just in the like less than twenty four hours between
(33:39):
when that episode came out and when we are recording
this one today. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts
at how stuff Works dot com. And then we're also
all over social media as miss and History. So that's
our Facebook and our Twitter and our Tumbler, which I
haven't updated in a while. Maybe I should get on that.
It's also our Pinterest on our Instagram. Our website is
(34:02):
missing history dot com, where you can find show notes
on all the episodes that Holly and I have ever
worked on, uh, searchable archive every episode that we have
ever done. There's a tag up there called Christmas episodes
that has all of our Christmas episodes that we have
worked on, uh, which this one fits right into. So
you can do all that in a whole lot more
(34:23):
on our website which is missing. History dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is It,
How stuff Works dot com
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, Merry
Christmas to listeners who are celebrating indeed, or I mean,
(00:21):
if you aren't celebrating, you just want to be wished
Merry Christmas. Today's episode is coming out on December twenty,
so it seems like a good time to talk about
a very Christmas related listener request, which is how the
North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD started tracking Santa
Claus on Christmas Eve every year. This is something that
(00:43):
we've gotten several requests for, including from Elaine and Tori.
And at one point last year or the year before,
I asked on our Facebook page for people to suggest
holiday ideas and somebody suggested this one, and a lot
of people were like, I would like that please, m mmmmmm.
So here we are. So this whole story that circulates
about how NORAD started tracking Santa is pretty heartwarming, but
(01:06):
it doesn't a hundred percent hold up. So there's a
little bit of myth busting here and maybe just the tiniest,
piniest bit of bo humbug me just a little what
you're telling me. It didn't start with Jack Skellington and
his attempt to take over Christmas. No, but that would
be line. Does that make sense? He was a threat.
(01:28):
They had to start watching him, and then they were like,
let's do it every year. That's my version. I like
your version. So a note to parents on this one.
If your kids eagerly awaited St Nick's arrival this year,
then today's show is probably a little bit more mature
and candid than they'll really enjoy, So we would recommend
saving it for later or giving it an advanced listen
(01:48):
on your own to decide whether your kids would enjoy
hearing it before sharing it with them. The story of
NORAD's annual Santa Tracking really begins not with Jack Skellington,
but with the Cold War. After the end of World
War Two, the United States increasingly felt the need to
prepare a defense against a potential Soviet attack. Lots of
(02:10):
different projects and programs were related to this basic idea,
but when it comes to Norad, the worry was of
a direct attack by Soviet bombers reaching US soil. That
meant that the nation was looking for a way to
detect such an attack when it was still far enough
away to intercept before anyone came to harm. At first,
this task fell to the Air Defense Command, which divided
(02:31):
the responsibility up among different Air Force commands around the country.
Each command was responsible for protecting a different part of
US territory, but by the nineteen fifties, with fears of
a Soviet attack continuing to escalate, the United States created
a unified command to oversee protection of the entire nation.
This was the Continental Air Defense Command or CONNAD. KANAD
(02:55):
was a multi service command, combining the Army, Navy, and
Air Force, but the Air Force still did a lot
of the heavy lifting. Condents efforts combined long range radar
systems which would provide advanced notice of an incoming attack,
with aircraft capable of intercepting that attack once it was detected.
So it was basically like a trip wire made out
(03:15):
of radar, and if anything tripped the wire, the Air
Force could respond quickly and aggressively. Eventually, the United States
military came to the conclusion that it was not enough
to focus just on the United States in this effort,
not when there was a neighbor to the north that
would almost certainly be flown over in the event of
a Soviet attack. Since Canada shared the United States fears
(03:37):
about the possibility of such an attack, it made a
lot of sense for the two nations to work together.
The US and Canada had been at least to some extent,
sharing domestic defense plans since the nineteen forties. In the fifties,
they began signing defense agreements related to expanding this long
range radar capability into Canadian territory. This coopera Asian kept
(04:00):
growing until the establishment of NORAD or the North American
Air Defense Command, which was the successor to CONNAD, on
September twel NORAD was initially headquartered at an Air Force
base in Colorado Springs, which was home to the US
Continental Air Defense Command and the US Air Force Air
Defense Command. General Earl Partridge of the U s Air Force,
(04:23):
previously commander of both KANNAD and the Air Defense Command,
became commander of NORAD, and he was joined by Deputy
Commander Air Marshal Roy Sleiman from the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Although the treaty allows for the NORAD commander to be
Canadian or American, and it's a requirement for the commander
and deputy commander to be from different countries. Traditionally, the
(04:45):
commander has been American and the deputy commander has been Canadian.
After expensive debate and a fair amount of controversy, the
formal treaty that came to be known as the NORAD
Agreement was signed on May twelfth. It provided the framework
for how the two countries, governments and militaries would cooperate
in the realm of air defense. NORAD's headquarters had actually
(05:08):
moved a couple of times since it was established. First
in the nineteen sixties, it moved from end to Air
Force Base to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado. This
is the massive underground complex of buildings constructed under a
literal mountain, designed to be able to survive virtually any
attack or disaster. This facility has actually made its way
(05:29):
into popular culture through depictions like the nineteen eighties three
movie War Games, the TV series Stargate, and the fictional
Crystal Peak, California in Terminator three, which is very clearly
patterned after Cheyenne Mountain. Is so very clearly patterned after
Hyenne Mountain that I in the years that have intervened
since seeing that movie conflated them in my head, and
(05:50):
when working out this podcast was like, oh wait, that
was a different place. In two thousand six, nora ADS
day to day operations were moved to Peterson Air Force
Base and Passo County near Colorado Springs, with the Cheyenne
Mountain Facility continuing to work as nora ADS alternative command center.
The nora AD Agreement itself has also been reviewed and
(06:10):
revised several times since it was originally signed. Since nineteen
fifty eight, the agreement has been renewed nine times, including
four major revisions which took place in nineteen seventy five,
nine six, and two thousand six. The shift from air
defense to aerospace defense as it's known today came along
(06:30):
in nineteen eight one as well. The primary missions of
nora AD under the two thousand six renewal are aerospace warning,
aerospace control, and maritime warning for all of North America,
and there are a lot of different potential threats that
are looped into these three primary missions, including attacks by aircraft,
missiles or space vehicles, drug trafficking and other illegal activity
(06:53):
carried out by air, and nuclear attacks delivered by strategic
ballistic missile, cruise, missile or long range aircraft AFT. The
maritime warning component also relates to both nations internal waterways
and the maritime approaches to both countries. So after getting
through all of this, it may seem a little weird
for NORAD, the binational Cold War era entity, once headquartered
(07:17):
in a sophisticated bunker complex under an impenetrable mountain, which
is responsible for detecting long range threats to North America
by air, water, and outer space, to track Santa Claus.
It does sort of seem like an awful lot after all,
at least in terms of international military defense. Santa Claus
is not a threat, and there's no mention of Santa
(07:38):
at all in the NORAD agreement. So we're going to
talk about how this all came to be after a
quick sponsor break, and if somehow you still have very
young listeners with you after having gotten through all of
that air defense talk, uh, it really might be a
good time to find another activity for them. NORAD's tracking
(08:03):
of Santa is often compared to the September editorial in
The New York Sun That is the same paper that
published the Great Moon Hoax in eight thirty five editorial
ran under the headline is there a Santa Claus? More
commonly known today as Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa
Claus thanks to its later reprintings in children's book form.
(08:26):
It started with a letter by Virginia O'Hanlon, daughter of
coroner's assistant Dr. Philip O'Hanlon. She had written to The
New York Sun earlier that summer quote, Dear editor, I
am eight years old. Some of my friends say there
is no Santa Claus. Papa says, if you see it
in the Sun, it's so. Please tell me the truth.
(08:46):
Is there a Santa Claus. Virginia had intended for her
letter to go into The Sun's Q and A column,
Notes and Queries, but it went unanswered. I just need
to take a minute to note the irony. Uh, if
you see it in the Sun, it's so. When the
Sun published the Great Moon Hoax, it's sort of beautiful.
(09:11):
I mean, did you not know that that was not
a hoax? Those those bad people live on the moon.
Definitely lunar beavers anyway, So young Virginia Handlon anxiously awaited
for her letter to be answered. It was not until
weeks later when the paper published an editorial response by
(09:32):
Francis parcelist Church, and it began, quote, Virginia, your little
friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism
of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see.
They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible
by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be
men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours.
(09:55):
Man is a mere insect, an aunt in his intellect
as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured
by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole truth of
truth and knowledge. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
We won't read the whole thing. It goes on, but
it ends no Santa Claus. Thank God, he lives, and
(10:19):
he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia named
ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue
to make glad the heart of childhood. Although this editorial
is often remembered as an immediate, instantly beloved success that
became an annual tradition right from the beginning, the Sun
(10:39):
didn't actually print it again until nineteen o two, and
then again in nineteen o six. Between nineteen o seven
and nineteen seventeen, it was printed six more times, and
The Sun started reprinting it annually in the nineteen twenties.
The story of the Yes Virginia article and that of
Norad tracking Santa do have some similarities. Both start with
(11:01):
an inquisitive child followed by the somewhat surprising response of
an adult, which then grows into something that's a ubiquitous
part of Christmas for a lot of people. We have
a lot more verifiable detail about Yes Virginia than we
do about nora AD's tracking of Santa. We know who
Virginia was and who her father was. We know who
wrote the column and when it was published. Although it
(11:22):
didn't originally carry a byline. Thanks to archived copies of
the newspaper itself, we know when it was reprinted and
when it wasn't, and we can see the newspaper's attitude
about these reprints shift over time, basically moving from well,
since you people are asking again, we will print this thing.
I guess two. Here is our beloved holiday classic. Please
(11:44):
enjoy it in the spirit of Christmas. And by comparison,
the Norad story is a sieve. The most popular version
goes like this. In Sears, Roebuck and Company ran an
ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and that ad
read quote, Hey, kitties, call me direct on my Marry
XMSS telephone. Just dial M E two dash six eight one. Kitties,
(12:10):
be sure and dial the correct number. Call me on
my private phone and I will talk to you personally anytime,
day or night, or come in and visit me at
Sears Toyland. And that was signed by Santa Claus. The
number actually appears into places Mary x miss morphs into
m E two one as well. Yeah, the Emmy and
(12:32):
Mary turn into the first two parts of the first
two letters of the exchange for the phone number. So
the most popular version of this story is that Emmy
two one was a typo connecting callers not to a
special Santa Claus call center at Sears, but to the
top secret red phone at CONAD headquarters, the one that
(12:53):
was a direct line to the Pentagon, known only to
top generals and the president. And this story when the
red phone started ringing off the hook, con AD staff
played along a number of stories. Uh and versions of
this telling also cite a specific person having answered that phone.
Colonel Harry Shout. Shout told the story himself in multiple
(13:15):
interviews over the years. In an interview that was recorded
towards the end of his life, he says that he
answered the red phone thinking that it was the Pentagon
or Colonel Partridge. When he realized that the collar was
not the Pentagon or Colonel Partridge, Shout thought that it
was someone on his staff playing some kind of prank
on him, and he did not appreciate it at all.
(13:37):
But then he realized that it was a child, a
little girl, trying to reach Santa, so he played along,
hearing the child's entire wish list and the fact their
house had a chimney, and her assurances that she would
leave food out for Santa and the reindeer. At least
in the portion of the interview that's publicly available, he
doesn't mention a misprint in an ad Shouts. Adult children
(13:59):
told this story a little bit differently in a story
Corps segment that appeared on Morning Edition in Pamela Farrell,
Terry Van Curen, and Rick Shoup, who would have been
about ten six and newly born when this all happened,
are in line with their father's version when it comes
to his being at first annoyed at this call, But
the way they tell it, the call was from a
(14:21):
boy whose mother eventually came on the line to tell
Shoup about the misprinted ad. In the Story Corps version,
the misprint meant that the boy's call was one of many,
so many that Shoup tasked two airmen with answering the phone.
Their Story Corp account goes on to include a moment
later that same Christmas season when one of the men
at Connad headquarters had drawn Santa's sleigh on the glass
(14:44):
board that was used to track aircraft, shop saw it,
and from that had the idea to tell a radio
station that Connad was tracking Santa on Christmas Eve. The
communication with the radio station probably came from Colonel Barney Oldfield,
the public relations officer, and not from Shoup directly. There
was indeed an Associated Press article on Christmas Eve nineteen
(15:08):
fifty five in which Knat assured Santa safe passage. The
article also someone alarmingly explains that US and Canadian forces
would be guarding Santa's flight from potential attack by Christmas haters.
It uses almost those words I don't remember the exact
wording that it uses, but it's basically like we're protecting
Santa from the enemies of Christmas using our armaments. I'm
(15:31):
gonna go with another Jack Skellington moment here. So it
seems pretty likely that there was a child who accidentally
called Kannat in nineteen fifty five, likely trying to dial
a number that was in an AD. There was a
December one, nine article in the Pasadena Independent with the
(15:52):
dateline of Colorado Springs, which reports that a youngster reversed
two digits of a number set up to answer queries
about Santa and instead reached KANNAD. Colonel Harry Shout is
quoted in this piece as having replied to this child quote,
there may be a guy called Santa Claus at the
north Pole, but he's not the one I worry about
coming from that direction. I also tried to find evidence
(16:15):
that this ad really did run in the Colorado Springs
Gazette in nineteen but the archive that I had access
to only goes back to nineteen sixty, by which point
Emmy two one was the phone number for a Colorado
Springs real estate agent Mary Listings. Everyone but even though
(16:37):
there is that likely grain of truth in the starting point,
this story has clearly blossomed and morphed a bit over
the years. In the earliest recorded accounts, the child reached
an unlisted number, not the Red phone, and since the
entire point of the Red Phone was to have a direct,
uninterruptible line between Kannad and the Pentagon, it would not
have even been connected to a public exchange where someone
(16:59):
could dial it by accident. It's also not all that
likely that an ad having a phone number in it
would contain the same typo in two different places. I mean,
I could see some scenarios where that would happen, but
it's more conceivable for a child who have fumble fingered
the phone number one time than for the number to
have been wrong in the ad twice and sparked an
(17:20):
avalanche of calls to Connad and the nay says. Of
the naysayers suggests that this ad was created and printed
by Connad sometime after to add support to this whole story,
or to kind of nod to the whole story that
it was not the like the ad. There's a picture
of the ad that circulates around. People are like that's
a mocked up ad. Yeah, it's like a retroactive folkloric
(17:45):
proof um. And though we do have the account of
Colonel Schaup and his grown children based on their childhood memories,
so far, there is no record of any person, or
certainly any hundreds of people coming forward to say that
they accidentally called hand in attempting to speak with Santa.
I want to make it super clear here that I
don't think the Shout family was like intentionally making anything up.
(18:09):
But when you tell the same story over and over
again for forty something years or however long, it gets
bigger over time, especially when you're like having to do
it in front of an audience. Well, and there's also
the telephone factor, by which I mean the game of
telephone were like. Because they were children when this all
(18:30):
went down, I'm sure that story was also told to
them by adults as part of like you know, the
family folklore, and those details probably got slippy along the way.
Many things contribute to that. I think we've all had
those family stories that are like that seems a little
different from the way I heard it twenty years ago,
but okay, no harmon are so. According to NORAD's own account,
(18:53):
By the time NORAD replaced con AD, the Santa the
Santa tracking was an annual tradition, and we're going to
talk more about how that developed and grew After another
quick sponsor break. Military efforts to do a little Christmas
pr by way of Santa Claus actually go back to
(19:14):
before Colonel Shop and the sears AD. For example, the
United States State Department Telegraph branch distributed a copy of
a radio grand that had been purportedly dispatched to Chris
Kringle at the North Pole on Christmas Eve of nineteen
forty eight. It said, in part, quote your coming mission
in connection with Operation Noel awaited with considerable interest by
(19:38):
Department reaction. Your visit expected to be one of joy
and goodwill to wide eyed children. The communic a then
went on to authorize Santa to communicate to all men
a quote united desire for peace on Earth, and it
authorized him to proceed down all chimneys, though quote you
are not repeat not to omit consideration of even the
(20:00):
smallest stalking. Apparently the State Department gets the Boss Santa around.
How does that chain of command even work? So? An
Air Force seasonal Communica that same year read quote our
early warning radar net to the north gives following spot
position report of object detect detected heading southerly direction, one
(20:24):
unidentified sleigh powered by eight reindeer at fourteen thousand feet
heading one degrees. Interceptors alerted and vector but unable contact.
Estimated time of arrival over targets December. So the combination
of the military and Santa predates Colonel Schaup and that
(20:45):
whole story, And according to a two thousand rite up
in Airmen Magazine, after that errand call or calls to
con AD in n con ADS, tracking of Santa became
an annual tradition pretty much immediately. A warding to this article,
in nineteen fifty six, public relations officer Colonel Barney Oldfield
(21:05):
asked Colonel Harry Shoup if they might set up a
special phone line for Santa inquiries after the wild success
of the previous year. Schoup actually didn't want to, but
the media had already gotten wind of this idea, including
visiting his home and getting his kids all excited about it,
so he begrudgingly agreed, and by the time Norad replaced
(21:26):
Khad a year later, this was an established tradition. Let's right,
out there was one of those things that was written
many many decades after this originally happened, and there is
some doubt about exactly how big a deal this was
in nineteen and nineteen fifty six. In August second nineteen
fifty six article on Colonel Shop in the Pittsburgh Press
(21:48):
is all about his public and media relations work on
behalf of the Military and Kannad. It's really focused on
an award that he was receiving for handling a jet
noise problem and Madison, Wisconsin. But it also mentions that
he was on See It Now with Edward R. Murrow,
and he had consulted on a short film called twenty
four Hour Alert starring Jack Webb, which was basically a
(22:11):
propaganda short for the Air Force. The Pittsburgh Press article
ends with Shops saying how important it is for urban
dwellers to quote feel themselves in league with and contributory
to air defense. But it makes no mention of Shaop
having had anything to do with Santa Claus or any
con AD program to track Santa. If that nine Christmas
(22:33):
had been such a success, with the nineteen fifty six
Santa hotline already in the works, it likely would have
been mentioned given the subject of the article. He was
being covered in the Pittsburgh Press. We should mention because
he actually grew up in nearby Bessemer, Pennsylvania. Yeah, so,
not only had Shop done a bunch of media slash
pr work for the military leading up to this point,
(22:56):
it seems really weird if the Conad Santa traditional is
already such a big deal that it would not have
come up in the context of what they were talking
about here, unless I wonder if they would have omitted
it in order to um protect the younger crowd. You
can't tell the story of how it came to be
without divulging some information. Sure that could make sense. I
(23:20):
still have doubts though anyway. I mean, that's once again
similar to how people remember in air quotes the New
York Suns Yes Virginia column as this instant classic, even
though it didn't become an annual feature for decades and
the Sun was actually kind of grudgingly doing it at first.
But it seems likely that Conrad Santa tracking programs had
(23:42):
kind of a lower and smaller start than the whole
hundreds of people called in nineteen fifty five. And we've
been doing it ever since. Uh progression, which is how
it has entered the popular understanding of all this. Norad
Santa Tracker was definitely reading by the nineteen sixties, though,
with Nora d producing and sending Vinyl records to radio
(24:05):
stations to play as scheduled Santa updates. On the b
sides were Christmas songs performed by the NORAD Commander's Band
that to me, is perhaps the most charming thing in
this entire episode. In the nine seventies and eighties, the
focus turned to TV, with similarly prerecorded Santa Status updates
that were replayed year after year. This is definitely what
(24:27):
I remember from my my childhood. I specifically remember the
warning that that ended with all children go to bed
immediately in a very stern voice. Uh. And there was
one year that like I needed to brush my teeth
or something, and I wasn't quite old enough to do
that on my own, and my mom was tidying in
(24:48):
the kitchen, and I was very distressed that Norad was
telling me I needed to go to bed immediately, but
like my mom was not available to brush my teeth.
I had a similar distress confusion concern because um, my
mother and I would go to midnight Mass usually, and
I was like, how can this be right? That this
(25:09):
is a thing we're supposed to do, but this is
the thing that the government is telling us to do.
It was conflicting directives that led to a little bit
of we were very stressy children. I think I think
we were. I was. I was. I'm still an anxious person.
I was definitely an anxious child, and I was very
worried that if I was not in bed on time
(25:30):
that Santa would come to our house. I would not
be in bed, we would not get any presents. Also
in this same era, in nineteen seventy one, NORAD spent
about three thousand dollars on a Norad Tracts Santa publicity film.
With the evolution of the Internet, Santa tracking has of
course become ever more complex, Starting with a partnership with
(25:50):
a o L in the Worldwide Web's early years, A
Santa Cam network was also launched in nine, which was
the Santa trackers first online here at this point, I mean,
really since the early years, this is unquestionably at least
as much about pr for Nora Ad and others as
it is about seasonal goodwill. There is merchandise you can buy.
(26:16):
There are corporate sponsorships which are reportedly what pays for
this today. Although I have some questions, Uh, Like it's
as a person who works at a job, it makes
sense that maybe the budget for the online Santa track
or website is coming through corporate partnerships, But like, are
the corporate partnerships paying for the jet takeoff that we're
(26:38):
going to talk about in a minute, How does that work? Uh?
But it's definitely regardless of who is actually paying for
all the things. It's a PR effort. There's a flashy
website and nora Ad and Santa, a winning combination was
awarded the Silver Anvil Award of Excellence for Reputation Management
(27:01):
and Brand Management by the Public Relations Society of America.
Is Santa getting a cut of any of this? That's
what I want to know. I have questions to um.
According to the PR s A site inn, nora Ad
saw six hundred sixty increase in website traffic because of
Santa Tracker publicity, along with a thirty increase in social
(27:24):
media traffic over just a month. This note ends with
quote because of the nora Ad Track Santa program, nora
Ad is a household name. Now more than ever, NORAD
is universally recognized as their premier authority monitoring the North
American skies. This is why a couple of years ago,
when people got really upset that there was a nora
Ad track Santa video in which there was a fighter
(27:47):
jet escorting Santa and his sleigh, people got like really
mad about the militarization of Christmas, and other people were like,
where have you been? This has been going on for
to gates. All of this radio and TV and online
work has also been accompanied by pictures and videos and
articles peppered through with references to all the high tech
(28:09):
military gear that NORAD says it's using to track Santa.
So the descriptions of the Santa tracker are also a
chance to sort of clue the public in on what
kind of technology NORAD has at its disposal for seventeen.
That includes NORAD's North Warning System, which is a collection
of forty seven radar installations in Canada and Alaska, along
(28:30):
with infrared satellites to detect Rudolph's news, and a worldwide
Santa Cam network that turns on the cameras about an
hour before Santa enters a country and then turns them
off again when he leaves, and Canadian NORAD pilots fly
CF eighteen fighter jets out of Newfoundland to welcome Santa
(28:52):
to North America. And this is where I'm like, does
the corporate sponsorship pay for that? And is it a
takeoff that's actually happening for real? That's the part that
I'm more inclined to question did that really happen? And
this is one of the ways that the Nora ad
st story really diverges from Yes Virginia. Yes Virginia is
all about how Santa is real, emphasizing imagination and faith
(29:15):
and the intangible, but not suggesting that he isn't in
the flesh human person that the writer himself personally met
at some point. Nor Add on the other hand, straight
up says that the fighter jet pilots of Intersect have
intercepted Santa a bunch of times, and that Santa always
waves because he likes to see the pilots today. The
(29:37):
nora Ad Track Santa website is in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese,
and Chinese. There are apps available to track him for
Apple and Google Play, as well as a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
and Instagram, on Star contracts Santa, and then there's a
nora Ad Track Santa Alexa skill. For a while, Google
(30:00):
Maps had an official partnership with nora And for the
Santa Tracker, but that partnership ended in and Google put
that work into its own Santa Tracker. And I read
an article that was like, I tried to get into
the bottom. I tried to get to the bottom of
what happened between nora Ad and Google. Was there a fight?
Was their drama somehow? No one really knows. Today, the
(30:22):
nora Ad Track Santa call center has more than a
thousand volunteers who answer calls every Christmas Eve. They the
volunteers average roughly forty calls an hour. It's usually a
two hour shift. They also answered questions via email, a
lot of kids calling and asking where Santa is uh,
questions pertaining Santa and presents and Christmas and things like that.
(30:47):
And it's clear that, regardless of the shakiness of the
origin story, Colonel schaup ended up loving the Norad Santa Tracker.
His children described it as a thing he was proudest
of in his career and after his retirement, he would
still help with Christmas Eve Santa tracking. Colonel Schaup died
on March fourteen, two thousand nine, at the age of nine.
(31:10):
And that is the history of why Nora ad tracts
Santa every year. Uh. I still have some questions that
some of which will never be answered. Yeah, I don't
think any of our questions will be answered. Do you
have any listener mail that we can answer questions or
reply to in our concrete way? So yes, this is uh.
(31:31):
This is from Rachel. It is about our recent six
Impossible episodes that was all listener requests, and it is
about the Great Window frog Fight. And I would like
to say that that episode came out yesterday afternoon, like
midlate afternoon Eastern time, yesterday afternoon. By nine o'clock this morning,
we had six emails about the frog fight. So clearly
(31:54):
the frog fight was the hit for that day. Uh,
And Rachel says, high ladies, I yearly jumped out of
my chair when in your most recent episode you covered
the frogs of Wyndham. I grew up in Willimantic and
frogs were everywhere in town. As you mentioned. There is
an operetta by uh By Burton Levitt called the frogs
(32:16):
of Windhom. Many organizations find a way to incorporate the
frog into their logos. The town has even done painted
frog sculptures, much like the painted scout the painted cow
sculptures in other towns. The image that you used of
the bridge represents a few things about Windom. The spool
of threat is from the American Thread Factory, a major
(32:36):
employer in town in the eighteen hundred to nineteen hundreds.
The frogs on them are I think of frog comments
of Puerto Rico, which represents the diversity in town. The
version of the story that I heard is that once
people heard the tale the tale, townsfolk were known as
the fools of Wyndham, and people would reply that they
were not from Windom, but from Willomantic. The county is
(32:56):
actually Windom County and contains the towns of North Windham's,
South Windom, Windom Center in Willomantic. Well Emantic is the
Algonquin term for the river. I was just so excited
that my hometown was covered in one of my favorite podcasts.
Thank you for all that you do and all the
interesting topics of conversation that you start tears. Rachel thank
you so much Rachel for this note. Uh. It has
(33:17):
always We've said before, so nice to hear from people who,
when we tell a story that's local to them, have
some personal local history slash flavor to share about it.
And I was not expecting the frog fight to be
nearly as popular in our email is it has been
just in the like less than twenty four hours between
(33:39):
when that episode came out and when we are recording
this one today. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts
at how stuff Works dot com. And then we're also
all over social media as miss and History. So that's
our Facebook and our Twitter and our Tumbler, which I
haven't updated in a while. Maybe I should get on that.
It's also our Pinterest on our Instagram. Our website is
(34:02):
missing history dot com, where you can find show notes
on all the episodes that Holly and I have ever
worked on, uh, searchable archive every episode that we have
ever done. There's a tag up there called Christmas episodes
that has all of our Christmas episodes that we have
worked on, uh, which this one fits right into. So
you can do all that in a whole lot more
(34:23):
on our website which is missing. History dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is It,
How stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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