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"Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. Seems very unlikely. 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. Before this message a series of entirely routine messages had been 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. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. On 2 August 1947, Star Dust, a British South American Airways (BSAA) Avro Lancastrian airliner on a flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile, crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. Discussion Morse '._._.' The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . A Spanish magazine about UFOs appropriated STENDEK as its title, and at least one U.S. comic book illustrated the disappearance of the Stardust, pondering the meaning of STENDEC for its fascinated readers. The problem here though is that, even if this was the case, it would be unusual for Harmer to use a phrase which was not internationally recognised, and only specifically known to allied participants of the war. STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. . Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. 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. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. [10] It has also been suggested that World War II pilots used this seemingly obscure abbreviation when an aircraft was in hazardous weather and was likely to crash, meaning "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing". Bennett finished his life as a supporter, and occasional candidate, for a variety of xenophobic and extremist political parties -- a sad end for one of the world's greatest pilots and air navigators of the 1930s and 1940s. 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. - - . One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. If so, according to their timings, they had already passed Los Cerrillos, where they could have safely landed as intended, so this doesnt seem to make much sense either. Using the The searchers discovered one propeller, its tips scarred and bent backward, indicating that the prop had been revolving when the Lancastrian plowed into the Tupungato glacier. Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes This sentence now makes perfect sense, with Harmer announcing that they were expected to arrive in Santiago at 17:45 hours, at Los Cerrillos Airport. Didn't the test Tudor flight crash because the aileron controls had been reversed (e.g trying to roll right rolled the aircraft left) or am I thinking of a different British test aircraft crash. The STENDEC Puzzle Ever since BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust vanished on a flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, the ending of its final transmission - STENDEC - has continued to puzzle experts and amateurs alike. For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. . Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? 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. Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. I was a radio operator aboard an R.A.N. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). 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! Its not even common practice for a plane to transmit its name at the end of a routine message, so this theory also unfortunately falls flat. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly They had been . [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. some similarities both in Morse code and English /- /.-/ .-./ -../ ..-/ / - (Stardust) Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence . In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this Sign in to continue reading. _. Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. The most likely reality is that sending STENDEC was a mistake of some sort by Star Dusts radio operator. Already a member? And if there was any meaning to it, it wasnt in regards to the crash. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. Scherer, J. radio operator getting his planes name wrong on 3 occasions. 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. Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go. 10 'Unsolved' Mysteries That Have Been Solved. On BSAA's Transatlantic services, moreover, it was operating at the ragged edge of its range when flying westbound. Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. It was also, as OP says, unpressurized, so that passengers as well as crew had to breathe supplemental oxygen through masks while above 15,000 feet. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. - /. 2023 Little Green Footballs These included suggestions that the radio operator, possibly suffering from hypoxia, had scrambled the word "DESCENT" (of which "STENDEC" is an anagram); that "STENDEC" may have been the initials of some obscure phrase or that the airport radio operator had misheard the Morse code transmission despite it reportedly having been repeated multiple times. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example / -.. / . Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. / -.. / . Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. Submissions should outline a mystery and provide a link to a more detailed review of the case such as a Wiki article or news report. Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. Its certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. After this, British civil aviation authorities withdrew the Tudor's certification to carry passengers, and the few remaining examples concluded their operational service as cargo and tanker aircraft. / -.. / . The Theory [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. 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. 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. For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. on initials. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Firstly, despite it being easy to rearrange STENDEC quickly in English text, doing the same in morse code is much more complex and highly implausible due to the nature of the language. 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 first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. . Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is 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. Possibly because he was finishing "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. - - . . Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. [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. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. Mysteries STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. 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. The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. / / -.-. Mysteries Of Flight: The Curious Case Of Pan Am Flight 914, Fond Farewell to a Titan: The Antonov An-225, Plane & Pilot Survey: Pilots and Politics, Accident Brief: Piper PA28R Crash In Georgia. on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was Something like "We're completely screwed.". 1 Pan Am Flight 7 (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.). / -. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. / -.-. [11], In 2000, an Argentine Army expedition found additional wreckageincluding a propeller and wheels (one of which had an intact and inflated tyre)and noted that the wreckage was well localised, a fact which pointed to a head-on impact with the ground, and which also ruled out a mid-air explosion. 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. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? / - / . [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. / - /. [17] One of the pilots recalled that "we had all been warned not to enter cloud over the mountains as the turbulence and icing posed too great a threat. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. . This would mean the message he was trying to send Los Cerrillos was instead: When you look at the beginning of the words, you can notice some similarities, which shows how easy it can sometimes be to mistranslate morse code. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa_EU5_gWrA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident#cite_note-SAR_Technology_-_Aviation_Cold_Case_Response-22, https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/a-pilots-last-words-stendec/, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vanished/stendec.html, https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/vanished.shtml, https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/05/stendec-mystery/, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/06/owenbowcott1v, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jul/08/2, http://www.sartechnology.ca/sartechnology/ST_STENDEC_ColdCase.htm, http://www.ntskeptics.org/2010/2010december/december2010.pdf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosigns_for_Morse_code, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/06/owenbowcott1. Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. a new clue the truth is we will never know for sure what that final But there are no old, bold pilots. Several body parts were also discovered, most of them intact due to being preserved in ice, and were later confirmed through DNA to be the passengers and crew of Stardust. Blast From the Past: The North Texas Skeptic, May 1999, Republican Senator Claims 'The Left' Will Start a Civil War Unless Federal Highway System Abolished, A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline, Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud, Cutting IRS Funding Is a Gift to Americas Wealthiest Tax Evaders, Record 6,542 Guns Intercepted at US Airport Security in 22, Interview With Oklahoma State Sen. Nathan Dahm, US: Russia Has Committed Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine, Joel Cummins Umphreys McGee Keyboard Rig - January 2023 [VIDEO], Oklahoma Judge Transfers Lesbian Moms Parental Rights to Her Sons Sperm Donor. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] 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. out very fast. Read on these 10 strange mysteries that were solved later. No distress transmission was received; the last broadcast from the aircraft was a routine position check, about two hours before it should have reached its destination. attention, and another signing off. 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. unanswered. destroyer escort during the 70's.We were morse code trained. 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. Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew Using the A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. one mystery still remains. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information of the station they wish to contact. this method of communication. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. What was experienced radio operator Dennis Harmer trying to say? otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. . Ball lightning. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. It was the manicured hand of a young woman lying among the ice and rocks. It seems The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. [5] The passengers were one woman and five men of Palestinian, Swiss, German and British nationality. _.. . Something like "We're completely screwed.". Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. 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. The On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. 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. Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" In 1950, one of these, Star Girl, had no fewer than 83 passengers and crew crammed into it on a charter flight from Dublin to Llandow, a low-cost airport near Cardiff in Wales. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the The theory / -. 20 passengers and crew were lost. So mysterious was the disappearance of the plane - coupled with it's final strange message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. course. The site had been difficult to reach. 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. Plane and Pilot expands upon the vast base of knowledge and experience from aviations most reputable influencers to inspire, educate, entertain and inform. The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was While the fate of Star Dust had finally been solved, remaining in its wake was still the mystery of the crews final messageSTENDEC. The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. Other explanations for the appearance Mystery solved. 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. based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with That's also how Carole Lombard died. 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. in other words 'EC' without the space. . And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. 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. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. 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. Many people wrote pointing out that STENDEC is an anagram of descent. Neither men were taken to the jail. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! 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. Voice STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code Spektator 13K subscribers Subscribe 20K views 1 year ago #Documentary #Mystery When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, its. 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. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme page. It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. It is now believed that the crew became confused as to their exact location while flying at high altitudes through the (then poorly understood) jet stream. This would have explained the suddenness of its disappearance, and the fact that large pieces of wreckage had not been spotted during a wide air and land search. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . . The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. "[12], A set of events similar to those that doomed Star Dust also caused the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972 (depicted in the film Alive), although there were survivors from that crash because it involved a glancing blow to a mountainside rather than a head-on collision. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? / -.. / . The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. . It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts The airliner will stay lost for 51 years until 1998 when mountaineers find parts of the wreckage on Mount Tupungato 50 miles east from the planes destination, Santiago. A Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. 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. The theory about it meaning emergency crash landing is interesting but given a lack of sources outside of a few people telling anecdotes I don't know how believable it is. / - / . Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. 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. Blast From the Past: The North Texas Skeptic, May 1999, Republican Senator Claims 'The Left' Will Start a Civil War Unless Federal Highway System Abolished, A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline, Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud, Cutting IRS Funding Is a Gift to Americas Wealthiest Tax Evaders, Record 6,542 Guns Intercepted at US Airport Security in 22, Interview With Oklahoma State Sen. Nathan Dahm, US: Russia Has Committed Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine, Joel Cummins Umphreys McGee Keyboard Rig - January 2023 [VIDEO], Oklahoma Judge Transfers Lesbian Moms Parental Rights to Her Sons Sperm Donor. 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. It was underpowered, unstable in yaw on the ground (pilots of the Tudor got used to feeding in power at different levels from each engine on takeoff to prevent the beast from departing uncontrollably off the side of the runway), unpleasant to handle in the air, prone to leaks of all kinds, and an ergonomic and maintenance nightmare. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". The Avro Lancastrian was a civilian version of the wartime Lancaster heavy bomber.