New ways to track Santa’s flight tonight

DENVER, COL.— Alexa, where’s Santa?

Amazon’s diligent, computerized know-it-all is the latest technology to enlist in NORAD Tracks Santa, the military-run program that fields phone calls and emails from children around the world eager to ask when Santa will arrive.

Now entering its 62nd year, NORAD Tracks Santa will go live Sunday, with about 1,500 volunteers answering calls and emails at Peterson air force base in Colorado Springs. Updates will be posted on social media and at noradsanta.org.

And if you have Amazon’s voiceactivated Echo device, you can ask Alexa once you enable the function.

The history of the program isn’t well documented, said Preston Schlachter, a spokesperson for the North American Aerospace Defence Command or NORAD, the U.S.-Canadian command that succeeded CONAD, which started the tracking program in 1955. But technology has always been at the heart of NORAD Tracks Santa.

TV and radio stations began broadcasting Christmas Eve bulletins from CONAD and NORAD. And by the 1980s, NORAD was soliciting phone calls from children. (The number is 877-Hi NORAD or 877-446-6723.)

NORAD added its tracking website in 1997. It went on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in 2008. Mobile apps came in 2011, Instagram in 2016.

Last year, NORAD Tracks Santa got nearly 154,200 phone calls and drew 10.7 million unique visitors to its website.

It snared 1.8 million Facebook followers, 382,000 YouTube views and 177,000 Twitter followers. And this year, Alexa joins the party. “Every new technology gets tried on Santa,” said Gerry Bowler, a Canadian historian whose books include Santa Claus: A Biography.

But NORAD’s Santa tracker is one of the only technological upgrades the public has welcomed into the Santa story, Bowler said.