Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Where’s Santa? Ask NORAD
As always, the aerospace defense agency will track Santa tonight, online and on the phone.
DENVER — Alexa, where’s Santa?
Amazon’s 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 Claus 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, Colo. Updates will be posted on social media and at www.noradsanta.org.
And if you have Amazon’s voice-activated Echo device, you can ask Alexa once you enable the function.
Technology has always been at the heart of NORAD Tracks Santa, which got its start in 1955 with an oldschool glitch.
An advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper that year invited kids to call Santa, but it mistakenly listed the number for the hotline at the U.S. Continental Air Defense Command. CONAD, as it was called, had the job of monitoring a vast radar network from a combat operations center in Colorado Springs, searching the skies for any hint of a nuclear attack by the onetime Soviet Union.
Col. Harry Shoup, who was in charge of the operations center, took the first child’s call. Once he figured out what was happening, he played along, he said in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press.
He told his staff what was happening and told them to play along, too.
By the 1980s, NORAD was soliciting phone calls from children. (The number is now 877-Hi NORAD or 877-446-6723.)
NORAD added its Santatracking website in 1997. It went on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in 2008. Mobile apps came in 2011, Instagram in 2016. And this year, Alexa joins the party.