How science made me believe in Santa Claus

These days, I bounce ideas often with James Adams, an anthropologist who is also a postdoctoral researcher in the CLIMATE Justice Initiative. He has motivated me to read more of non-Latour authors about the topic of scales and Earth. Real growth since the last time I talked about Latour! Recently, our conversation has turned to information and the Internet. Our conversation reminded me about a secret that I have held for decades, but I am ready to come clean: Science made me believe in Santa Claus. Okay, let me explain.

In the early 2000s, I was in 5th grade. During one random day during the holiday break, I caught a TV commercial advertising Santa tracking capabilities, by an entity called NORAD. This YouTube video NORAD Tracks Santa 2006 Trailer is similar to what I saw that day. In particular, these screenshots show what the commercial looked like:

I easily found the website that advertised the compelling promise to track Santa around the world on Christmas Eve. This screenshot is from the Wayback machine’s NORAD tracker page from December 2004, notably the 50th year of this general tradition. I highly recommend you click around to see what my ~10 year old self was reading.

After studying the website in detail, I was confused. Look at all these maps! Look at how Santa flew by the Eiffel Tower! A company called Analytical Graphics Inc. was apparently responsible for the visualizations, and they had a history of working with organizations like NASA and the European Space Agency, towards operations and programs of the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station. The thought emerged in the privacy of my own brain: “I really thought Santa wasn’t real. But now, I’m not sure.” I could not comprehend that the resources required to produce these maps, pictures, and maintain personnel to answer phone calls on Christmas Eve, were not made for actually tracking Santa. Unbenknownst to me, it was my first time seeing science and technology commit to convincing the public of a falsehood.

In hindsight, it is painfully obvious that the webcam pictures and the videos weren’t actully captured by cameras of some flying entity. The Comic Sans MS and web design would have given it away. You could read dozens of celebrity messages to give testimonials about the Santa tracker, and Clifford the Big Red Dog was one of the celebrity sources.

But in all seriousness, I ask, to what degree can science be complicit in deception to accomplish its aims of general outreach? One might argue there is no science presented here, and it’s just a fun display of technological prowess. Eh, science is there, in the vague sense that there were observations that could validate certain predictions (webcam shots to show whether Santa’s route matched or deviated from the predicted route), though I acknowledge there really was no actual science to follow.

During our conversation, James recommended a book by Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Here is an excerpt from the foreword about how the Internet functions as a network (p. xv):

More than that, this infrastructure and set of procedures grows out of U.S. government and military interests in developing high-technology communications capabilities (from ARPA to DARPA to dot-coms). At an even finer level of detail, the Internet is not a simple “ask and you shall receive” tool.

Santa Claus surveils for year-round morality. Conveniently, the NORAD Santa Tracker makes a convincing case to worry about what Santa thinks about you! The success of NORAD in providing resources every year to convince people about Santa tracking is in line with the increased role of government in maintaining certain beliefs in greater society, which historically were in the purview of parents. In addition, it normalizes the possibility of surveillance of ocean, land and sky, for the purpose of locating Santa. And of course, now in hindsight, it also makes sense why NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) leads this effort. NORAD “conducts aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning in the defense of North America” and has a domain name ending in .mil (military), after all.

Recently, NASA ignored the Navajo Nation’s calls to delay a mission to deliver human remains to the moon. NASA stated that “we do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity’s space efforts”. Yet, major government organizations make statements like this while their affiliated partners, commit to the myth of Santa Claus for over 50 years in their outreach activities. “Is Santa real?” is not a scientific question, but NORAD and the associated organizations contributing to the Santa Tracker have made it one, somehow.

Fun fact: each year around Christmas, the NORAD Santa Tracker website continues to show the Santa tracker map and still offers the staffed hotline for inquiries from curious minds. Had I known a few weeks ago, I would have called. My 10 year old self would have been too shy to ask, but today, I have my own curiosity, and it’s on my to-do list next year, to call and ask simply, “Is this real?”