Doing a DNA test for Santa probably isn’t something that police departments expect to be asked to do. After all, he is supposed to secretly “break” into your house once a year. But that’s exactly the request that one young girl made of her local police department.
The girl, a resident of Cumberland, reportedly mailed the partially eaten cookies and carrots that she discovered in her house on Christmas morning to her local police department requesting a DNA test. Chief Matthew Benson dutifully forwarded the evidence to the state Department of Health-Forensic Sciences unit for testing.
The results just came back, and while the department said it could not “definitively confirm or refute the presence of Santa” based on the tests, it did find a partial match “to a 1947 case centered around 34th Street in New York City” in a nod to the movie Miracle on 34th Street. However, the analysis did confirm that the carrots had been munched on by Rangifer tarandus, aka reindeer. Looks like Santa got away with it this time, but the kids are starting to get crafty.
