How a child's accidental call to a top-secret phone line launched NORAD's Santa Tracker

It began nearly 70 years ago when a five-year-old called a top-secret emergency line reserved for the U.S. president and four-star generals and asked, "Hello, is this Santa?"

It was December 1955 — the height of the Cold War. The phone that rang was big and red, only to be used during an international emergency.

That wrong number — and many others that followed because of a simple typo in a newspaper ad — ended up launching a mission like none other for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD: to develop a tracking system allowing families to follow Santa's journey around the world.

Since then, the Santa Tracker has become a source of joy for millions of children.

"This is a top secret line," explained Erin Gregory, curator of the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. "So when it rings, that [normally] means bad news."

Amid the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, a call to the NORAD hotline could have meant an incoming attack.

So when the phone rang that day in 1955, all eyes at the command centre turned to Col. Harry Shoup, the operations commander at the Continental Air Defence Command in Colorado, said Gregory.

At first, Shoup thought it was a joke and confronted the child, who burst into tears. Shoup quickly switched gears and bellowed "Ho, Ho, Ho!" taking on the role of jolly old Saint Nick.

As the story goes, Shoup later found out that Sears Roebuck & Co. had placed an advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper telling kids to call a phone number so they could talk to Santa. But there was a typo, and the kids who called the number reached NORAD's top-secret hotline instead.

As a joke, one of Shoup's staff put an image of a reindeer and sleigh on the board they used to track airborne objects, explained Gregory. That was the beginning of the tradition we know of today.

"So that's how it began — a typo and a joke," Gregory said.

Over the past seven decades, NORAD's Santa mission has grown thanks to teams of volunteers who field phone calls — some 130,000 a year on average — and its digital reach has grown from a tracker website to social media, attracting several million visitors from more than 200 countries and territories around the world.

The website is available in nine languages including French, Portuguese and Chinese. 

This marks the 68th Christmas that NORAD is tracking Santa's flight, and Korean has now been added to its growing list of available languages.