For 62nd year, NORAD tracks Santa's whereabouts

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. – Hundreds of volunteers at an Air Force base in Colorado were answering questions on Sunday from eager children who wanted to know where Santa was on his Christmas Eve travels. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump also pitched in and took calls for the NORAD Tracks Santa program from their Florida estate.

It is the 62nd year for the wildly popular program run by the U.S. and Canadian militaries. Some key facts about the program:

About 1,500 volunteers spent Christmas Eve answering calls and e-mails at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Updates were also posted on social media, and noradsanta.org offered updates in other languages.

New this year, people with Amazon's voice-activated Echo device could ask Alexa for updates.

A Colorado Springs newspaper ran an ad in 1955 inviting children to call Santa but mistakenly ran the phone number for the hot line at the Continental Air Defense Command, which was tasked with monitoring the skies for a possible nuclear attack by the 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. "Here I am saying, 'Ho, ho, ho, I am Santa,' " said Shoup, who died in 2009. "The crew was looking at me like I had lost it."

The program is now run by CONAD's successor, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a U.S.-Canadian command that monitors the skies over both countries.

Despite all those ways to track Santa, the phones were ringing nonstop all day with kids from as far away as Japan and the United Kingdom asking where Santa is and when he will be at their house, said NORAD spokesman Capt. Chase McFarland. Each volunteer was averaging about 80 calls an hour, he said.

Many callers have also been asking whether there is a special food they should leave for Santa, he said, and volunteers have been telling them that he'll eat anything they leave out. "He's not a picky eater," McFarland said.

Associated Press