USGS. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. Even if an equipment malfunction had occurred, what are the odds that only one word would be jumbled in the message and that it would be done so three times in exactly the same order? based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with The unit had to finish quickly. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. It was also noted that, despite being a pilot for four years and accruing a total flying time of nearly 2,000 hours for both the RAF and the BSAA, this was Cooks first flight across the Andes as Captain. The most likely reality is that sending STENDEC was a mistake of some sort by Star Dusts radio operator. Five months after the episode described by OP, one of BSAA's Avro Tudor IV aircraft, Star Tiger, with 31 persons on board, vanished on a flight from Lisbon to Bermuda with an intermediate fuel stop in the Azores. Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. While the fate of Star Dust had finally been solved, remaining in its wake was still the mystery of the crews final messageSTENDEC. [8], Star Dust left Buenos Aires at 1:46 pm on 2 August. It also seems clear that the message was not anticipating a crash, Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. . to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. message from Star Dust - "E.T.A. A WGBH-Boston NOVA: Vanished (2001) program about the crash commented: Some of the six passengers on board seemed to have stepped straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. They included a Palestinian businessman with a sizable diamond sewn into the lining of his jacket; a German migr, Marta Limpert, returning to Chile with the ashes of her dead husband; and a British courier carrying diplomatic correspondence. Could there be more to the story of Star Dusts crash? Was there a connection? Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. The With the disappearance occurring less than a month after the now infamous Roswell incident, unexplained events such as a vanishing plane were easily connected to the possibility of alien interference. The Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. / - (Descent) STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code | When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, it's unusual last message leaves the world with a 70 year old mystery still waiting to be solved. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely Now the plane has been found we know that it wasnt spirited away Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based . Outside of the music world, Joel is a best-selling author, releasing The Realists Guide to a Successful Music Career, which features Kris Williams is a lesbian, and that means she wont be seeing her son anytime soon. . [3][pageneeded], Star Dust carried six passengers and a crew of five on its final flight. To put it simply, Cook chose the worst route possible in consideration of the conditions, which more than likely played a key role in the planes disappearance. [18], Star Dust is likely to have flown into a nearly vertical snowfield near the top of the glacier, causing an avalanche that buried the wreckage within seconds and concealed it from searchers. / / -.-. Whilst a reasonable theory on the surface, its unfortunately also quite reasonable to discredit. enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. use SOS, the internationally accepted distress signal? This was the case in 1947 when an airliner crashed in the Andes, killing everyone aboard. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. Why would the operator say end? radio operator getting his planes name wrong on 3 occasions. Hence we have: One of those two people was Nando Parrado and in his book "Miracle in the Andes" he describes that their flight also left in poor, inadvisable conditions. Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. [16] If the airliner, which had to cross the Andes mountain range at 24,000 feet (7,300m), had entered the jet-stream zonewhich in this area normally blows from the west and south-west, resulting in the aircraft encountering a headwindthis would have significantly decreased the aircraft's ground speed. Background Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, STENDEC - The Worlds Most Mysterious Morse Code, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(RAF). [12], A report by an amateur radio operator who claimed to have received a faint SOS signal from Star Dust initially raised hopes that there might have been survivors,[11] but all subsequent attempts over the years to find the vanished aircraft failed. a new clue the truth is we will never know for sure what that final It has therefore been suggested that, in the absence of visual sightings of the ground due to the clouds, a navigational error could have been made as the aircraft flew through the jet streama phenomenon not well understood in 1947, in which high-altitude winds can blow at high speed in directions different from those of winds observed at ground level. If spacing between letters is hard to distinguish, its clear to see how some characters can be accidentally mistaken for others, leading to incorrect words or phrases. problem, here is a website which translates English into Morse code. [22] Alternatively, the Morse spelling for "STENDEC" is one character off from instead spelling VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, 110 kilometers north of Santiago. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Their discovery revived. (STENDEC) Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Reading The Online Photographer lead me to this article. [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? With morse code being a binary combination of dots and dashes, something as simple as one or two incorrect inputs can make a drastic difference to how a word is interpreted. What did the crew of BSAA Flight CS-59 mean when they sent and repeated the cryptic message STENDEC via Morse code seconds before crashing? I personally believe that the word was a misinterpretation of the code, but theories span far and wide on what the now notorious phrase stood for. Morse '._._.' It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. [13], A 2000 Argentine Air Force investigation cleared Cook of any blame, concluding that the crash had resulted from "a heavy snowstorm" and "very cloudy weather", as a result of which the crew "were unable to correct their positioning". There are theories that STENDEC was an abbreviation or acronym of a much larger phrase, and when you break it down you can imagine a whole host of sentences could be constructed using these letters. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes The theory is the pilot mistakenly plotted their course as if they were leaving from a different airport, and it led to them crashing into a mountain. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . 2023 Little Green Footballs They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. of the station they wish to contact. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages ntskeptics.org The "STENDEC mystery," referring to the cryptic message sent by a Lancastrian airliner before it vanished in the Andes, is a staple of the UFO culture. In January 2000, a 100-man search party from the Argentine Army clambered 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) up Tupungato Mountain, a 6,552-meter (21,490-foot) volcano, where it located parts of the plane, as well as human bones, at the base of a glacier. This one individual in particular mentioned that he asked his 80 year old father, who remembers hearing the phrase being used often by the radio operator on his ship when he served in the Merchant Marine during WWII. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. It has to be this one in my opinion. [4], Star Dust's last flight was the final leg of BSAA Flight CS59, which had started in London on an Avro York named Star Mist on 29 July 1947, landing in Buenos Aires on 1 August. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? The theory It never landed in Santiagothe aircraft seemingly vanished from existence. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. of the station they wish to contact. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code - - . / -.-. 'Star Dust' did, however, broadcast a last, cryptic, Morse message; "STENDEC", which was received by Santiago Airport at 17:41 hrs - just four minutes before it's planned landing time. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. STENDEC is the same Morse as SCTI AR if you don't consider any spacing between characters. A popular one is that STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT and the letters were re-arranged due to Harmer suffering from the effects of hypoxia. With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. / -. Imagine your last communication with someone being the equivalent of covfefe and it turning into a mystery that people puzzle over for decades, I still have no clue what covfefe means and suspect people will puzzle over it for decades, British South American Airways (BSAA), the operator of the doomed aircraft, was a particularly unfortunate air carrier. code. . The Morse for AR is.- /.-. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled Read on these 10 strange mysteries that were solved later. between the letters). in other words 'EC' without the space. "Santiago tower even navigator doesnt exactly know" That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. destroyer escort during the 70's.We were morse code trained. The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Reading The Online Photographer lead me to this article. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. The Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube Avro Lancastrian (Public domain image)It was a story borne out all too often in the annals of aviation disasters. More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). Whilst many accepted that the fate of Stardust and its crew had been settled, the absence of a wreckage, along with the mysterious circumstances surrounding its final message, lead to widespread speculation, with theories spanning from sabotage to extraterrestrial in nature. In 1998, over 50 years after the disappearance of Stardust, a group of Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato, one of the highest mountains in the Andes and roughly 50 miles east of Santiago, stumbled upon the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of the Lancastrian. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name / . [citation needed], Mistakenly assuming their ground speed to be faster than it really was, the crew might have deduced that they had already safely crossed the Andes, and so commenced their descent to Santiago, whereas in fact they were still a considerable distance to the east-north-east and were approaching the cloud-enshrouded Tupungato Glacier at high speed. / -.. / . An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. It was delivered to BSAA on 12 January 1946, was registered on 16 January as G-AGWH and given the individual aircraft name "Star Dust". Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). Investigators concluded that the crew, flying in a snowstorm against a powerful jet stream, had become confused about their location and believed they were closer to Santiago than they actually were. one mystery still remains. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. On BSAA's Transatlantic services, moreover, it was operating at the ragged edge of its range when flying westbound. [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. / -. The crew of Stardust, including the radio operator Harmer, had all served in the RAF previously during WWII, so if this phrase is true, then it is possible that they were all familiar with the term and used it in a time of crisis. No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. On Saturday 2nd August 1947, at around 1:45pm, an Avro Lancastrian Mk.III passenger plane known as Stardust departed from Buenos Aires, Argentina to make a roughly 3 hour 45 minute trip to Santiago, Chile. I was a radio operator aboard an R.A.N. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. 56K views 8 months ago #Disasters #History For over 50 years the fate of Flight CS-59 remained a mystery. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. As only one young woman was on board, it was assumed to have been that of Iris Moreen Evans, a 26-year-old from the Rhondda valley. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared / -. most of the mysteries surrounding Stardusts disappearance, I couldnt find a source for this, but according to theorists online, this was a known phrase for allied fighter pilots in WWII for if their plane was about to crash land. - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning It wasnt until 1998 that a group of Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato, approximately 50 miles east of Santiago, stumbled upon wreckage from the crash. on initials. / - /. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. Among the grisly remains scattered over a radius of more than a mile on the glacier were three human torsos, a foot in an ankle boot and a hand with fingers outstretched. Understanding STENDEC has been the quest for many experienced and avid radio operators, with online forums dedicated to deciphering what Dennis Harmer was trying to say. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly - / . out very fast. Procedures for sending and receiving messages were and are standardised whether you are services or civilian operators.Regarding the 'mystery' surrounding Harmer's last transmission.Firstly, an operator always has in front of them a written copy of the message being sent. At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. message from Star Dust -. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" selection of the ideas. Whilst this possibility lends true to the first half of the word, the rest does not match up with this theory, and considering it was sent through and received the exact same three times over, its hard to imagine this error occurring on both ends. Mysteries Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and / - /. Each letter in morse code consists of a number of unique dots and dashes, so to scramble a word like descent in such a way is highly unlikely, especially three times in succession. (ETA LATE) / -.-. Discussion The site had been difficult to reach. Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. In January 2000, a 100-man search party from the Argentine Army clambered 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) up Tupungato Mountain, a 6,552-meter (21,490-foot) volcano, where it located parts of the plane, as well as human bones, at the base of a glacier. Thanks SK. Subscribe now for ad-free access!Register and sign in to a free LGF account before subscribing, and your ad-free access will be automatically enabled. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. the operator use a calling up sign in the middle of his message? STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. The Theory (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. Don Bennett, its manager, had already been fired by then, partly as a result of his insistence to all and sundry that Star Tiger was a victim of sabotage and that the British Government, for unknown but nefarious reasons of its own, was covering up the crime. / -. Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. That's also how Carole Lombard died. Perhaps STENDEC was an abbreviation for a much longer message, an acronym sent in a hurry due to being in a crunch for time. Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Harris Joel is a founding member and the resident keyboard wizard for Umphreys McGee AND a long-time Phish fan! Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. Due to the poor visibility caused by the storm, its possible that the crew were unaware that their plane was on course to collide with the mountainside, and unknowingly plummeted the aircraft into the summit before eventually succumbing to the elements. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. Even if exchanges between two operators become conversational, the operator writes the reply before sending it.From this, and from standard morse procedure, Harmer's transmission would be to inform Stardust's ETA, destination city, airport code SCTI ( Los Cerillos), and conclude with prosign AR (dit dah, dit dah dit) to end transmission. tower aircraft now descending entering cloud") A WGBH-Boston NOVA: Vanished (2001) program about the crash commented: Some of the six passengers on board seemed to have stepped straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. They included a Palestinian businessman with a sizable diamond sewn into the lining of his jacket; a German migr, Marta Limpert, returning to Chile with the ashes of her dead husband; and a British courier carrying diplomatic correspondence. And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes As it turns out, STENDEC is an anagram of the word "descent." One popular theory is that the crew, flying at 24,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft, suffered from hypoxia. 'ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs STENDEC' The flight itself was the last leg of a journey which originated from London, with the trip across the Atlantic taking place in a York aircraft, transferring to the Stardust for the crossing of the Andes Mountains. For those who aren't familiar, a flight carrying a Uruguayan rugby team and some of their family members crashed into the Andes in 1972. The experienced crew of the "Stardust" apparently realized the plane was off course in a northerly direction (it was found eighty kilometers off its flight path), or they purposely departed from the charted route to avoid bad weather. On board the British South American Airways flight were five crew members and six passengers, including the Captain, Commander Reginald J. Cook, an experienced and former RAF pilot during World War II. Sometimes These Enigmas Never Decipher. The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space The actual For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. / -.-. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. A common example of this would be SOS, which is the internationally recognised distress signal in morse code to call for help. Morse transmissions prior to picking up voice communication. All rights reserved. Bennett, commander of the Royal Air Force's [Pathfinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(RAF) during the Second World War -- it developed an unenviable record for unexplained disappearances of its airliners in flight. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. For a more detailed explanation Then four years ago, several Argentinians climbing Mount Tupungato stumbled across part of a Rolls Royce engine, fragments of fuselage and strips of bleached clothing. Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory And why not When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . Checklin never married and his immediate family is now dead, so she and her brothers must decide whether to bring the body back to Britain. Below we include a / -.-. Believers of this theory claim it stood for something like, Stardust tank empty, no diesel, expected crash, or, Santiago tower, emergency, now descending, entering cloud. Experts on Morse code are quick to call hogwash on this theory, however, saying that the crew would have never cryptically abbreviated an important message. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie Weird December 2010 Views: 31,837 ntskeptics.org The "STENDEC mystery," referring to the cryptic message sent by a Lancastrian airliner before it vanished in the Andes, is a staple of the UFO culture. Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent.

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