Where is Santa please Mr Pentagon?

America’s most advanced satellites which track anything airborne or in space posing a potential threat to the US homeland have a special challenge ahead. However, for the only time in the year the mission is purely benign and is carried out for the benefit of children who want to know when Santa Claus is due to arrive over their rooftops. Tracking Santa and his escorting reindeer has been one of the least onerous duties taken on each year by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command, housed in a deep bunker buried under the granite Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. A dedicated team of more than 1,500 military and civilian staff members of NORAD as well as local volunteers is already standing by to man the phones as children ring to ask where Santa is. They know from NORAD’s tracking-Santa website that on Christmas Eve the satellite operators will be following Santa’s progress across the skies once he has left his home base in the North Pole and heads off to deliver Christmas gifts to 7.5 billion people living on the planet.For millions of children around the world, it’s a serious business. A spokesman for NORAD said that as soon as Santa Claus had left the North Pole, children started phoning and emailing demanding to know which direction he was taking and at what time he might arrive at their address. All the tracking details are fed into NORAD’s website which is accessible to the outside world. “Last year we had 53,000 phone calls from children, two million more contacted us through social media and we had 14 million visits to our website,” the NORAD spokesman said. With the world facing so many crises, the spokesman said, it was a change to deal with something that was positive, giving hope and excitement to children. The “NORAD tracks Santa” operation began in 1955 after a bizarre breach of security which under other circumstances might have led to an emergency internal inquiry. However, the breach was caused unwittingly by a young child. Attempting to reach Santa, the child dialled a phone number which appeared in a department store advert in a local newspaper. The phone number was supposed to provide a direct line to Santa. But there was a misprint and, instead, the call went through to the Continental Air Defence Command (CONAD) operations centre in Colorado Springs, then responsible for providing early warning of a Soviet bomber air raid. Instead of putting the phone down, Colonel Harry Shoup, US Air Force duty commander at CONAD, assured the child that he was Santa. More calls followed that night, and the obliging colonel appointed a member of his staff to play the role. The tracking-Santa tradition was thus born, and NORAD took over the responsibility when it was formed in 1958.