They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. 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! There's still no explanation for the loss of Star Ariel, but so many things went wrong with Tudors on such a regular basis that its disappearance is hardly to be wondered at. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. 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. Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. 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. [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. A common example of this would be SOS, which is the internationally recognised distress signal in morse code to call for help. Weird December 2010 Views: 31,751. . However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. STENDEC and STAR DUST are coded similarly in both English and Morse code, causing some to theorize that Harmer sent one when he actually meant the other. Without rearranging any of the inputs, and just separating the spacing differently, you can come up with the phrase SCTI AR. This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. Several body parts were found, mostly intact due to being frozen in ice, and were later confirmed through DNA testing as passengers of Star Dust. They had been . 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 following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. 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. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? attention, and another signing off. 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. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning 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. . 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. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this / . between the letters). [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. Thanks SK. The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf But there are no old, bold pilots. that Morse transmissions were closing down. - . of the station they wish to contact. Its certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. 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. A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. At around 5:41pm, after transmitting routine communications to the plane as usual, the control tower at Los Cerrillos Airport in Santiago received this morse code message from Stardust: Perplexed by the final word in the telegram, the Chilean operator requested Stardusts radio officer, Dennis Harmer, to relay the message back to him, only to hear the same word, STENDEC, repeated loud and clearly twice in succession. 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 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. / - / . They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. . The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. up sign. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . / -.. / . 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. This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. [6] Marta Limpert, a German migr, was the only passenger known for certain to have initially boarded Star Mist in London[7] before changing aircraft in Buenos Aires to continue on to Santiago with the other passengers. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. (ETA LATE) Below we include a Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence / -.. / . The misunderstanding of their actual location reminds me of Uruguayan Flight 571, the subject of the book and movie Alive! End Credits. This gives us the very All rights reserved. SAR The flight was conducted in zero-visibility conditions, so its unlikely the crew had any idea their plane was about to impact a mountainside. They included Palestinian, Swiss, German and British passengers, a diplomatic courier and the crew: the pilot Reginald Cooke, 44; first officer Norman Hilton Cooke, 39; radiotelegraph operator Dennis Harmer, 27; second officer Donald Checklin, 27; and Iris Evans. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. Discussion Other explanations for the appearance On August 2, 1947, the Stardust, a Lancastrian III passenger plane with eleven people on board, was almost four hours into its flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile. made with the control tower at Santiago. The last two possible mistranslations both involve an input mistake of some sort, but there is another phrase which uses the exact same morse code sequence as STENDEC but with different spacing. / -.. / . No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. (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.). The Theory BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved . Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. 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. Why would the operator say end? 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. 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. From this time Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. 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. . Morse '._._.' 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. Possibly because he was finishing More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts. 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. They were so far off course they were trapped in the mountains struggling to survive for 72 days before they were rescued, and then only because of an incredible hike out of the mountains by two of the severely weakened survivors with no climbing gear or experience or any idea where they really were. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled - . "STENDEC Solved." The North Texas Skeptic. 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"). same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" [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. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish 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. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. [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. Investigators concluded that the crew, flying in a snowstorm against a powerful jet stream, must have become confused about their location and believed they were closer to their destination then they actually were, with the crash being the result of a controlled descent into terrain. They were in a remarkable state of preservation; freeze-dried by icy winds, the remains had not suffered bacteriological decay. Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. /- (ST) 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. the sign off for a Morse code message is AR. was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information 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. the ETA. At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. 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. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. (STENDEC). British . The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. Sometimes These Enigmas Never Decipher. / . Furthermore, Something like "We're completely screwed.". Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. This was the case in 1947 when an airliner crashed in the Andes, killing everyone aboard. 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. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). 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. The [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. this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). 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. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. 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. What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? The theory The 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. 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. attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling 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. very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy A few years later, more debris was found on the mountain, suggesting that the plane had made a head-on impact with the ground due to the close proximity and condition of the wreckage. by aliens. 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. 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. With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. 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. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. The disappearance of Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos Two men (unrelated, who didn't know each other) disappeared from Naples, Florida three months apart under the exact same circumstances. Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the 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. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. Americas owner-flown aircraft enthusiasts and active-pilot resource, delivered to your inbox! 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. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. Plane and Pilot builds on more than 50 years of serving pilots and owners of aircraft with the goal of empowering our readers to improve their knowledge and enthusiasm for aviation. When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! In January 2000, they located the site and began recovering debris. In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #3 Posted February 8, 2001 previous set The word STENDEC means: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-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". 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. 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. 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. 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. / -.-. 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. Its fate became one of the most puzzling aviation mysteries of its time. It has to be this one in my opinion. "Santiago tower even navigator doesnt exactly know" hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and 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. Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. INITIALS that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. The weather on the day consisted of snowstorms in the Andes Mountains with moderate to intense turbulence, whilst visual contact with the ground would have been extremely low and unfit for flying. selection of the ideas. flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago / - /. Their discovery revived. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting 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. 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. (STENDEC) By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. The Foreign Office yesterday confirmed that after initially unsuccessful attempts, Argentinian scientists have found close family matches. [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. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. On August 2, 1947, the Stardust, a Lancastrian III passenger plane with eleven people on board, was almost four hours into its flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile. Discussion After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. 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. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. . '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. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts He flew Lancaster bombers and got medals for bringing back his aircraft one time on a wing and a prayer.".
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