Many people wrote pointing out that STENDEC is an anagram of descent. The captain, Reginald Cook, was an experienced former Royal Air Force pilot with combat experience during the Second World War, as were his first officer, Norman Hilton Cook, and second officer, Donald Checklin. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. For example, if you lose the first two dots in the word STENDEC, and rearrange the spacing of the letters, the word could instead be interpreted as ETA LA(E)TE, albeit with a rogue E thrown into the mix. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. Again, this is the same as ST, only with different spacing.- (V) Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space of Stendec. More Mysterious Disappearances That Were Later Solved Plane and Pilot expands upon the vast base of knowledge and experience from aviations most reputable influencers to inspire, educate, entertain and inform. flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport A Pilot's Last Words: "STENDEC" - Plane & Pilot Magazine But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC 1947 Official Accident Report Below is the 1947 official accident report describing what was known at the time about Stardust, its crew, and its mysterious disappearance. - /. in other words 'EC' without the space. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name The North Texas Skeptic The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites, Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. More interestingly, the morse code for STENDEC is only one character off from instead spelling VALP, which is almost the call sign for the closest airport to Valparaiso, 110km northwest of Santiago. Anagram Theory In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. 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. SAR Technology - Aviation Cold Case Response Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images. The public, still reeling from the now-famous flying saucer incident in Roswell, New Mexico, a few weeks earlier, went wild with theories, speculating everything from sabotage to alien abduction. Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? 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. And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes Was there a connection? Star Dust, registration G-AGWH, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, departed Buenos Aires for Santiago at 13.46 on 2 August 1947. by aliens. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here - (STENDEC). operator to scramble the message. Presumed to have crash landed somewhere along the route, a five day effort began by both Chilean and Argentine search teams, including fellow BSAA pilots, yet no trace of the aircraft or its passengers were found. clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. The Chilean operator did mention how Harmers messages came through unusually fast, so there is every chance that some letters were incorrectly spaced and caused confusion to the control tower. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. amusing messages based on using STENDEC as a series of initials: Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" Explaining the unexplained: 10 famous mysteries solved Was there a connection? As one of the pilots was dying he kept repeating, "We passed Curico," still bewildered as to how they had ended up in the peaks. According to experts, if an additional space had been added between the first two letters, STENDEC would translate to: ATTENTION END END OF MESSAGE. It seems a bit redundant to say END and then END OF MESSAGE, however. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish 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". hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and [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. . [9] This leg of the flight was apparently uneventful until the radio operator (Harmer) sent a routine message in Morse code to the airport in Santiago at 5:41 pm, announcing an expected arrival of 5:45 pm. Sometimes human error leads to some of the most interesting mysteries but generally when you hear hooves you want to think horses before you think zebras. What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. 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. For one, call signs for all BSAA flights in the 1940s began with star. Its unlikely that this would have been a point of confusion for Harmer, especially given that STENDEC wasnt a word. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. [13] Some BSAA pilots, however, expressed scepticism at this theory; convinced that Cook would not have started his descent without a positive indication that he had crossed the mountains; they have suggested that strong winds may have brought down the craft in some other way. The Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. So mysterious was (STENDEC) 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. / - / . STENDEC - Solved?! Well that was fascinating and, while kinda sad I'm not going to pretend is not kinda funny hearing you explain all the ways that the Tudor sucked shit. Similarly, another Morse expert has pointed out that to attract between the letters). 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. The accident aircraft, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, was built as constructor's number 1280 for the Argentine Ministry of Supply to carry thirteen passengers, and first flew on 27 November 1945. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable even has an entry for STENDEC. Dozens of books and articles have examined the evidence, turned it over, twisted it, rearranged the letters, and drawn a blank. / -.. / . A (These individuals ignore the fact that almost any other triangle of a similar size, drawn anywhere else in the North Atlantic, would yield a similar if not greater number of disappearances.). 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 Chilean operator wasn't able to read the airport code and prosign sign off as merely procedural.Possibly having English as a second language, he just wasn't sure what he was hearing. All Rights Reserved / -.. / . Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. - / . Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. Several people have pointed out that [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. It even inspired a new name for a UFO magazineSTENDEK. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. 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! In Morse code, determining accurate spacing between characters is vital to properly interpret the message; "STENDEC" uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as "SCTI AR" (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos Airport in Santiago, "over"). 20 passengers and crew were lost. Morse '._._.' same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) Almost a year after the loss of Star Tiger, her sister aircraft, Star Ariel, also vanished in good weather while on a flight from Bermuda to Jamaica. Furthermore, But would they repeat AR too, not just the airport code, for clarity? It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. 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. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. 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. . Another noticeable similarity is that the word STENDEC has some resemblance to the word STARDUST, and perhaps Harmer misspelled the name of the aircraft in morse code. Whilst it's certainly a bizarre coincidence, especially given the circumstances, the theory goes that Harmer was trying to inform the control tower that the plane was going down. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. Other explanations for the appearance - - . / -.-. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. 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. 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. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing". that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence _._. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. Their discovery revived. 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. losing the first two dots) yields ETA LATE - apparently a common the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never And why not State Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-OK) has penned several bills loosening gun restrictions, including the nation's first anti-red flag MUNICH (AP) The United States has determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday, insisting that justice must be served to the perpetrators. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? It's possible that the desire to descend as soon as possible to a level at which the passengers could breathe normally may have factored into Star Dust's premature departure from a safe crossing altitude. Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. much harder in Morse code.-.. / . When flying at high altitudes, oxygen molecules are harder to inhale, and if a plane is not pressurized, it can lead to hypoxia, a condition which can impair or even completely destroy your ability to function. Operating as Flight CS-59, aka Star Dust, the four-engine aircraft was en route from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile, with 11 people on board. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. Scherer, J. End Credits. . 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). The site had been difficult to reach. Sign up for our newsletter, full of tips, reviews and more! Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. Morse '._._.' 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. Very good writeup! It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only . Thanks SK. They were finally grounded in 1959, unsurprisingly after yet another ex-BSAA Tudor flew into a Turkish mountain, for reasons that remain unclear, killing all on board. - /. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. The word Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. case G-AGWH) rather than the romantic names airlines gave them. The unit had to finish quickly. / . 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. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in 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. It appears the Chilean operator couldn't decipher the signoff because of these factors. Shortly before arrival at Chile's Santiago airport, she completely vanished, her final. For a more detailed explanation In fact, this conspiracy ran for so long that even a Spanish magazine published in the 1970s, which was dedicated to UFOs and the paranormal, named itself after the now infamous morse code. This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before NOVA Online | Vanished! | 1947 Official Accident Report It was firstly noted that the Trans-Andean journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago can be taken via three routes: The Central (and most direct) via Mendoza, The Southern via Planchon and The Northern via San Juan. Relatives of the crew and passengers aboard a British plane which plunged into an Argentinian glacier 55 years ago have been told this week their DNA samples match human remains recovered from a crash site 15,000ft up in the Andes. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting The The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. 2023 Little Green Footballs It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. [8], Star Dust left Buenos Aires at 1:46 pm on 2 August. Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. Whilst its possible that STENDEC could mean any one of these phrases, theres nothing definitive I can find which suggests that this phrase ever meant anything previously, making it more unlikely that this word was used intentionally at all. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio The Army unit also discovered that the wheels on the plane were in an upward position, so the crew had not attempted an emergency landing. 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. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. Mrs Coalwood said: "He was my older cousin, who I idolised hopelessly. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? Four letter ICAO codes for airports had _. It is thought that the plane may have caused an avalanche upon impact, resulting in the snowy burial of the aircraft, concealing it from searchers whilst at the same time preserving it for its eventual discovery years later. USGS. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer
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