But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.Ā Hereās the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number.Ā And the number they printed?Ā It went straight through to fucking NORAD.Ā This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.Ā NORAD was the front line.
And it wasnāt just any number at NORAD.Ā Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. āOnly a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,ā she says.
āThis was the ā50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,ā Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. āAnd then there was a small voice that just asked, āIs this Santa Claus?ā ā
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke ā but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
āAnd Dad realized that it wasnāt a joke,ā her sister says. āSo he talked to him, ho-ho-hoād and asked if he had been a good boy and, āMay I talk to your mother?ā And the mother got on and said, āYou havenāt seen the paper yet? Thereās a phone number to call Santa. Itās in the Sears ad.ā Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.ā
āIt got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, āThe old manās really flipped his lid this time. Weāre answering Santa calls,ā ā Terri says.
āThe airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,ā Pam says.
āAnd Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,ā Rick says.
āDad said, āWhat is that?ā They say, āColonel, weāre sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?ā Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, āThis is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.ā Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, āWhereās Santa now?ā ā Terri says.
āAnd later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, āThank you, Colonel,ā for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,ā she says. āYou know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing heās known for.ā
āYeah,ā Rick [his son] says, āitās probably the thing he was proudest of, too.ā
So yeah.Ā I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
Source:Ā http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport
