According to the director of the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence Rhode Island, Tony Vecchio, "mammalogists have been fighting for years about whether it's true flight or what some of them used to call extended leaping.

   "Only recently, he says, have scientists and Santalogists agreed that reindeer are, in fact, flying. And news of this codification in the ranks of techno thinkers has been slow to spread."

   In 1822, Clement Moore wrote:

   Tough, tiny, shaggy and native to the farthest of the far north: perhaps Dasher, Dancer, Rudolph and friends are really Peary caribou. On the islands of the Canadian High Arctic, about as far toward the North Pole as land exists, the tough little Peary caribou live. They swim the icy channels between the islands; they haunt the windswept forbidding arctic places, where snow blows clear of their sparse food. They live so far in the barren north that the native Inuit and wolves seldom hunted them.

   "It's a strange little deer," says Pennsylvania naturalist, Bil Gilbert. "alot of people don't understand it, and therefore don't believe in it. A Peary weighs only a hundred-fifty pounds- that's where the "eight tiny reindeer' thing comes from," continues Gilbert. "What mystique they possess is attributable to their exotic looks, to their elusiveness and to the quasi-spiritual regions where they dwell."

   "But, really," one asks, "how do they FLY?" Says Gilbert, "it's called Bernoulli's principle, and has to do with air rushing over a flat surface, thus creating lift and loft." The flat surface is the massive shelf of the Peary antler. "the perfect rack acts as a big mainsail, lifting the beast heavenward. With nine sails out and atakeoff speed of about eight hundred miles an hour at the end of the runway, Santa's team would have liftoff power equivalent to several jet planes-and it would be about a hundredth the size of a Boeing 747," expounds Gilbert.

   "Many people you pass on the street, day in and day out, still do not believe." "And that's really too bad," says Vecchio, "because the flying reindeer is just about the most astounding animal in the world."