NORAD's Santa Tracker Began With A Typo And A Good Sport

This Christmas Eve people all over the world will log on to the official Santa Tracker to follow his progress through U.S. military radar. 

This all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup's secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.

Shoup's children, Terri Van Keuren, 65, Rick Shoup, 59, and Pam Farrell, 70, recently visited StoryCorps to talk about how the tradition began.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. "Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number," she says.

"This was the '50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States," Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. "And then there was a small voice that just asked, 'Is this Santa Claus?' "

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," her sister says. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.' 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."

"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,' " Terri says.

"The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them," Pam says.

"And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole," Rick says.

"Dad said, 'What is that?' They say, 'Colonel, we're sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?' Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, 'This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.' Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, 'Where's Santa now?' " Terri says.

"And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, 'Thank you, Colonel,' 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," she says. "You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he's known for."

"Yeah," Rick says, "it's probably the thing he was proudest of, too."

Flight Diverted Jets Scrambled AGAIN

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to AirTran flight number 39, nonstop to San Francisco... hah. We should be so lucky. Your in-flight breakfast this morning will be scrambled F-16s fresh from NORAD thanks to the loudmouthed drunk holed up in the can, whose uncooperative behavior necessitates a brief emergency stopover in Colorado Springs in order that said drunk and all the rest of you can be questioned by the Fibbies... "

Deja vous all over again, and again without a name or description of the "unruly" passenger:

Fighter jets scrambled again because of unruly airline passenger
January 8, 2010 5:49 p.m. EST

(CNN) -- In the second such incident in three days, fighter jets escorted a diverted commercial flight on Friday after an unruly passenger caused alarm onboard.

The military sent up two F-16s in response to reports of an unruly passenger aboard AirTran Flight 39, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement.

The passenger had become belligerent and refused to leave the restroom, airline spokesman Tad Hutcheson told CNN Friday. The passenger appeared to be intoxicated, he said.

The flight, bound for San Francisco, California, left Atlanta, Georgia, at 9:48 a.m. ET, according to AirTran's Web site.

NORAD dispatched the fighters at 1:44 p.m. ET, escorting the aircraft to a safe emergency landing in Colorado Springs, Colorado, officials said. The passenger was detained there and FBI agents from Denver, Colorado, were called to question passengers, Hutcheson said.

The other passengers were scheduled to continue their trip at 4:30 p.m. ET, he said.

On Wednesday, NORAD escorted a Hawaii-bound plane back to its origination point of Portland, Oregon, when an unruly passenger in coach became "uncooperative," a Hawaiian Airlines official said.