He’s Been… He’s Been… but of course we would know that if we had been monitoring NORAD’s Santa Tracker. In fact we’d know exactly when he was close to Chester during the night!
He has dropped off a large ammo can with some special geocaching gifts for some very lucky people to find. Hopefully anybody that manages to find this hidden treasure will be lucky enough to choose an individual gift which has come directly from the North Pole.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a United States and Canada bi-national organization charged with the missions of aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning for North America.
Its powerful radar system, called the North Warning System, has 47 installations across Alaska and northern Canada. As soon as that radar system picks up on Santa departing from the North Pole, NORAD tracks him via globally-integrated satellites using their infrared sensors. Normally, those sensors allow NORAD to see heat from launched rockets or missiles, but as Santa flies around the world, satellites track his position by detecting Rudolph's nose, which gives off an infrared signature similar to that of a missile.
So how did NORAD start tracking Santa? Legend has it that back in 1955, the folks at a Command Operations Center in Colorado were working a typical night shift when Air Force Col. Harry Shoup got a phone call on the “Red Telephone” from a child in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The boy had followed the directions in a department store's newspaper advertisement that told children how to call Santa — except the number had been printed incorrectly and instead called the operations center.
Shoup could have been a Scrooge about the whole thing, but he wasn't. He entertained the boy's call as well as the rest of the calls that came through due to the misprinted number. Throughout the night, Shoup and his operators answered calls, kicking off a new tradition.
The tracking of Santa is now an annual event around the world. In 2020, NORADSanta.org received more than 11 million visitors from 200+ countries; call centre volunteers answered more than 20,000 calls; Amazon Alexa was accessed more than 12.3 million times to locate Santa and the @noradsanta Facebook page has over 1.89 million followers. This year is expected to be the busiest year ever for both Santa and the NORAD tracker.