Al’s Christmas Tea: The Mystery of the Jersey Drones Meets the History of NORAD Tracking Santa

Plus why is "Stars and Stripes Forever" a Christmas song?

Welcome back in for Al’s Christmas Tea, our chance to stop and savor some of the stories and sounds of the season.

But first, why is the U.S. military more interested in tracking Santa Claus than it is massive drones plaguing the skies over New Jersey?

Tracking Santa. Check. Tracking Possible Enemy Drones? We’ll Get Back to You.

Each year on Christmas Eve, NORAD makes a huge deal out of tracking the global flight of one St. Nicholas and his nine reindeer. (Actually, there’s a sweet story behind this tradition, which we’ll get to below.)

Given that Santa’s flight poses no danger beyond falling reindeer scat, this seems a peculiar use of military resources. You’d also think a massive array of drones that have been plaguing the skies over New Jersey and New York would draw the full attention of the military, or at least the same amount of attention as Ol’ St. Nick.

Does that seem to be the case to you? Does the Biden-Harris administration seem rather nonchalant about the drones, as they were about the Chinese spy balloon over some nuclear facilities a while back? Have the short-timers completely checked out?

Not wanting to cause a panic is understandable. But this isn’t 1938. Back on Halloween eve in that year, Orson Wells terrified a good chunk of the nation with a radio broadcast describing an alien invasion taking place in real time in Grover Mills, New Jersey. Wells’s take on War of the Worlds was fiction. Unfortunately, the invasion taking place in the skies over New Jersey and New York now is not.

Just the other day, 50 drones were spotted coming in off the ocean. And they weren’t coming to pick up some Jersey pizza.

Whose drones are they?

Are They Iranian?

Congressman Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey said high-level sources are telling him that the massive array of drones that have been swarming over sensitive spots in several New Jersey counties belong to Iran — and that the terrorist regime has placed a “mothership” off the Eastern Seaboard as a base for this fleet.

BREAKING REPORT – DRONES OVER NEW JERSEY ARE FROM IRAN: Congressman Jeff Van Drew claims Iran has stationed a "mothership" off the U.S. East Coast, reportedly launching drones now flying over New Jersey. pic.twitter.com/ayV8tYioXA

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 11, 2024

Nothing to worry about. The country that vows “Death to America” and is only inches away from achieving nuclear capabilities, as well as being desperate to kill the incoming president of the United States, is flying car-sized drones over our heads … without interruption.

Or are they? The Pentagon is denying the story.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones toward the United States,” Defense Department spokeswoman Sabrina Singh insisted, adding that the DoD does not believe the drones are from a “foreign entity or adversary.”

Oh? The Department of Homeland Security told state and local officials Wednesday morning it is unclear who is operating the drones.

What is clear is these aren’t hobby craft. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy described the drones as “very sophisticated” and said “the minute [watchers] get their eyes on them, they go dark.” But in the next breath Murphy, incredulously, said the devices are not a threat to public safety.

According to the FBI, Murphy has no basis for saying that.

“There is nothing known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know — and that’s the concerning part,” Assistant FBI Director Robert Wheeler said during a congressional hearing on the drone sightings.

Where’s the U.S. military in all this? Maybe they’ll get on the case when the drones share their personal pronouns. Actually, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) asked the brass at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst why they hadn’t shot down the drones yet. The answer was that they haven’t been given the authority to do so. In the congressional hearing, Smith asked officials to give authorization to take out the drones so their identity and capabilities could be ascertained.

The mystery continues.

The Story Behind NORAD Tracking Santa

How did NORAD’s tradition of tracking Santa Claus begin? According to NORAD, it all began by accident in 1955. A young child trying to reach Santa dialed the number a local department store had misprinted for St. Nick in an ad. Instead of reaching the North Pole, the child called the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), the precursor to NORAD. The commander on duty, Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup, answered the call, immediately recognized the mistake, and assured the child he was Santa.

As more and more calls came in, Shoup assigned a duty officer to continue answering them. And the tradition was born.

These days, the NORAD Tracks Santa hotline receives about 130,000 calls a year from children around the world, with several million others clicking onto the NORAD Tracks Santa website.

Four Major Military Events That Happened at Christmas

The mix of Christmas and the American military goes back to before our founding. In fact, the Defense Department just released a list of four major military events that happened on Christmas.

Topping the list, of course, is George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776. The Continental Army’s surprise attack on the Hessians — German mercenaries hired by the British — was a major turning point in the American Revolution. That victory boosted the morale of the worn and weary army, and “it revived the hope of the colonists, who were beginning to think their battle for independence wasn’t feasible.”

The Civil War’s First Battle of Fort Fisher took place on Christmas in 1862. The effort by the Union to take the last port on the Atlantic controlled by the Confederacy was a disaster. However, in mid-January, the Union tried again and successfully captured the fort in the Second Battle of Fort Fisher.

In 1972, Christmas season brought Operation Linebacker II in North Vietnam, which was at that time the largest bombing mission in military history. Nicknamed the “11 Days of Christmas,” the campaign began on December 18 after North Vietnam walked away from peace talks. In 11 days, Linebacker II dropped 15,000 tons of bombs via 729 U.S. Air Force sorties involving about 12,000 airmen. According to the DoD, 1,600 structures, 500 rail targets, 10 airfields ,and 80% of North Vietnam’s electric-generating capacity were destroyed in the attacks. The North Vietnamese returned to the peace talks, and in January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed.

No one would ever consider “Stars and Stripes Forever” to be a Christmas song. However, the patriotic anthem was actually composed on Christmas Day 1896, as John Phillips Sousa was crossing the Atlantic on his way home from Europe. Sousa would say the song was born out of homesickness and his fondness for his days as director of the U.S. Marine Band.

So let’s strike up the band and head into the night with what we can accurately call a Christmas classic:

On the Stream Menu

Stream contributor Raymond Ibrahim tells us about how “Baby Muhammed Takes Over Europe.”

And our favorite Brit-turned-Italian citizen, Jules Gomes, raises a stink with “Make Cows Fart Again: UK Consumers Revolt Over ‘Poisoned’ Milk.”

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.