Less commonplace, however, are reports like this: “We [were] driving by a lonely McDonald’s and we [saw] something dashing through the clouds. We could all make out Santa’s sleigh and 9 reindeer including Rudolph’s nose.”

This is just one of the many Santa sightings that have recently been spotlighted on a website devoted to true-life tales of the unexplained. The person who compiled them, a veteran paranormal researcher named Stephen Wagner, is of the opinion that these accounts should be afforded the same respect as those concerning, say, Bigfoot or the Lost City of Atlantis, which represents a significant departure in a field that is sensitive about exposure to ridicule.

Wagner, who lives in Little Falls, N.Y., is no lightweight in the world of the paranormal. He has been researching supernatural events for over three decades. He has written a book on the subject—“Touched By a Miracle: True Stories of Ordinary People and Extraordinary Experiences”—and for 14 years has run a popular About.com page titled Paranormal Phenomena. Today, he is fast becoming the world’s leading—and possibly only—expert in Santa-seeing.

In the two years since Wagner started compiling these sightings, he has received “several hundred” submissions, and he is convinced that most of them are genuine in intent, if not verifiable in fact. His hope is that the stories will make people think a little differently about a holiday dream most of us leave behind in childhood. If nothing else, the frequency of these visions, and the sense of absolute certainty apparent in many of the people who have had them, speaks of the power this figure has over the collective imagination.

Sarah, a 41-year-old Californian who contributed to Wagner’s Xmas Files, had her encounter back in 1975. “I felt exhilarated, bewildered and very special,” she recalls, going on to describe the experience in almost mystical terms: “It was the beautiful golden glow around the man in the big red suit that told me it couldn’t possibly be my father. It was glittery like a parade, but the pieces were not falling to the ground.”

And the intervening years have not diminished Sarah’s sense of wonder. “Seeing Santa changed my outlook forever,” she adds, “to the point that I am comfortable with tattooing ol’ Big Red onto my body. It means that much to me.”

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E ven in the open-minded world that Wagner occupies, these festive visitations are raising eyebrows. While paranormal research doesn’t abide by the same strict rules as, say, nuclear physics, it is not entirely without standards. Proof isn’t particularly important in this world, but possibility is, and researchers perform all manner of conceptual gymnastics to maintain it. For example: Faced with an ongoing and abject failure to find anything remotely monstrous in Loch Ness, some have put forward the idea that Nessie may, in fact, be the ghost of a dinosaur—the key word here being “may.”

With Santa, even this standard falls away. Furthermore, these sightings sound a bit silly, which is something else serious researchers get touchy about. “I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa,” says Loyd Auerbach, who teaches a course on parapsychology at Atlantic University in Virginia. “The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.” Auerbach goes on to make a passable attempt at finding a maybe—“The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa”—before giving up. “I wouldn’t put that kind of sighting in the paranormal category,” he says finally. “We can’t investigate that. There’s nothing we can do with that.”

Wagner, for his part, is adamant that Santa sightings have a legitimate place in paranormal research. “Paranormal is, by definition, something that’s beyond the norm, unknown, unexplained,” he says. “I have postings on my site about apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and I get the same kinds of reactions—‘That’s not paranormal, that’s religion.’ Well, where do you draw the line? Whether these characters are fictional or real, these are experiences that people have had that have not been explained by science.”

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