The tradition of NORAD tracking Santa Claus began by accident during the Cold War. On Christmas Eve 1948, the U.S. Air Force issued a tongue-in-cheek statement that its radar had detected “one unidentified sleigh, powered by eight reindeer” heading south. This one-off report set a precedent, but the true inception came in 1955 with a famous wrong number. That December, a Sears Roebuck department store in Colorado published a newspaper ad inviting children to call Santa Claus, but the phone numbe