When Harry Shoup picked up the secret military hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command now known as Norad the Colonel expected it to be the Pentagon. After all, only Shoup and a four-star general in Washington, D.C. had the number to the red phone on Shoup’s desk in Colorado.
It was December 1955 during the Cold War and Shoup steeled himself, wondering if there was an impending missile or air attack. Instead, a small voice asked, “Is this Santa Claus?"
Shoup, fondly remembered by his children as ‘straight-laced’ and ‘disciplined’, thought it was a practical joke until the little boy started crying.
"Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," Shoup’s daughter, Pamela Farrell, told NPR. "So he talked to him, ‘ho-ho-ho'd’ and asked if he had been a good boy adding, 'May I talk to your mother?'”
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When Harry Shoup picked up the secret military hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command now known as Norad the Colonel expected it to be the Pentagon. After all, only Shoup and a four-star general in Washington, D.C. had the number to the red phone on Shoup’s desk in Colorado.
It was December 1955 during the Cold War and Shoup steeled himself, wondering if there was an impending missile or air attack. Instead, a small voice asked, “Is this Santa Claus?"
Shoup, fondly remembered by his children as ‘straight-laced’ and ‘disciplined’, thought it was a practical joke until the little boy started crying.
"Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," Shoup’s daughter, Pamela Farrell, told NPR. "So he talked to him, ‘ho-ho-ho'd’ and asked if he had been a good boy adding, 'May I talk to your mother?'”
The Sears advertisement contained a typo that encouraged children to call Norad
The woman let Shoup know she’d gotten the number from a Sears department store ad in the newspaper that encouraged readers to call Santa Claus. “You haven't seen the paper yet?” she asked.
The calls kept coming - so many, Shoup recruited a couple of airmen to answer the phone. "It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, 'The old man's really flipped his lid this time. We're answering Santa calls,' " Pamela’s sister Terri said.
Where’s Santa now?
Col. Harry Shoup, soon nicknamed "Santa Colonel", and the airmen used a glass board with a map of the US and Canada to track incoming planes. On December 24, 1955, someone drew on the board - a sleigh with eight reindeer flying over the North Pole were incoming.
Instead of disciplining his men, Col. Shoup called a radio station: 'This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.” The radio station called back hourly for updates on Santa’s location. The Norad Santa Tracker was such a hit children still call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) on December 24 to ask about Santa's exact location.
The annual event grew each year. On December 24, 1960, Norads northern command post in Quebec, Canada, provided updates of a sleigh operated by ‘S. Claus’ which they identified as ‘undoubtedly friendly’. During the evening, Norad said the sleigh stopped for an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay, where a Royal Canadian Air Force interceptor aircraft discovered Santa bandaging his reindeer Dancer's front foot.
More than 1,250 Canadian and American uniformed personnel and Defense Department civilians now volunteer their time on December 24th to answer the thousands of phone calls and emails that flood in from around the world to the call center in Colorado Springs.
Well into his 90s (Shoup died in 2009), the Colonel carried a locked briefcase containing the many Thank You letters he’d received. The Norad Santa Tracker was, his children recalled, an outstanding moment in his career and one that made him proud.
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