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. 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. All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. 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. out, but seems unlikely. by aliens. The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. Then nothing. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of 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. 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. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. 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. flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport 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. [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. That's also how Carole Lombard died. It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". 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. ETA LATE sounds like a reasonable message a plane would communicate to a control tower, although in the context of the whole sentence, it contradicts the first part completely, as they were only four minutes away from their destination. on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The Theory Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. 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. 20 passengers and crew were lost. [10], In 1998, two Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungatoabout 60mi (100km) west-southwest of Mendoza, and about 50mi (80km) east of Santiagofound the wreckage of a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, along with twisted pieces of metal and shreds of clothing, in the Tupungato Glacier at an elevation of 15,000ft (4,600m). - /. up sign. 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. that Morse transmissions were closing down. . ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. [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. . 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. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. 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). 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. [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. SCTI is the international airline code for Los Cerrillos Airport, and AR is a commonly used prosign for the word OUT, or End Of Transmission. 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. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly Scherer, J. What was experienced radio operator Dennis Harmer trying to say? Thanks SK. 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. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. / - / . Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the one mystery still remains. And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only Theories include everything from sabotage to aliens. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. - - . STENDEC/STAR DUST Theory The Avro Lancastrian was a civilian version of the wartime Lancaster heavy bomber. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? Just before the plane disappeared, it attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling [3][pageneeded], Star Dust carried six passengers and a crew of five on its final flight. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the The Avro Lancastrian began its life as a British Lancaster bomber in World War II. 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. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. 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. 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. (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.). [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. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". Mysteries They had been . On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. When Harmer and his crew sent their final message to Los Cerrillos, they had no idea that they were seconds away from a fatal impact. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. 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. Discussion Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. 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. - / . 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. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. - . and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. USGS. One final mystery lay in the last message sent out by the Star Dust. "STENDEC" in Morse code 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. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish 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. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. The mystery became an obsession of the innumerable "Bermuda Triangle" crackpots, who attribute almost all unexplained losses of ships and aircraft within a 500,000 square-mile area to paranormal activity. 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. selection of the ideas. For a more detailed explanation 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. . That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. 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. After getting the boot from BSAA, he launched his own fly-by-night airline, Airflight Ltd., using two Tudors he'd picked up cheaply and one of which he flew himself. A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. 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. Hence we have: "Santiago tower even navigator doesnt exactly know" Before this message a series of entirely routine messages had been See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. 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? 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. All Rights Reserved 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. 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? The actual Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C The names of the victims were known. Sign in to continue reading. The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. three times.STENDEC/Stardust Was there a connection? On August 2, 1947, the crew of a British South American Airways (BSAA) Lancastrian, an airliner version of the Avro Lancaster WWII bomber, sent a cryptic message. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. [10] However, Star Dust never arrived, no more radio transmissions were received by the airport, and intensive efforts by both Chilean and Argentine search teams, as well as by other BSAA pilots, failed to uncover any trace of the aircraft or of the people on board. With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. STENDEC - Solved?! 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. - - . By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. The Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. operator to scramble the message. Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. 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. Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. 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. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. [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". /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. - / . 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. Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space / -.. / . STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. close to an understanding of the message. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. The radio operator misheard the signal. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. word is meaningless in almost every language, and trying to use simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). STENDEC" That wasthe last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this It was concluded that, being his first Trans-Andean flight in command, and in view of the weather conditions, Cook should not have crossed via the direct route, and despite the absence of a wreckage, the plane likely perished somewhere along the snowy peaks of the Andes Mountains. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. 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. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code . 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 certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. And why not _._. 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. Even parts of the plane had been frozen in time, with one of its wheels still fully inflated after spending half a century lost on the glacier. The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. BSAA ran out of money and passengers' confidence in 1949, with the result that it was forcibly incorporated into the state-owned British Overseas Airways Corporation, a component of today's British Airways. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. / -.-. losing the first two dots) yields ETA LATE - apparently a common 1 Pan Am Flight 7 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. The operator understood that Star Dust intended to land in four minutes, but the final word, STENDEC, confused him. INITIALS [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. / -.-. This is, in my opinion, the most plausible theory of what STENDEC was supposed to be. the operator use a calling up sign in the middle of his message? However, while the aircraft was unpressurized, its crew had been supplied with oxygen. In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. Read on these 10 strange mysteries that were solved later. / - /. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. So mysterious was the disappearance of the plane - coupled with it's final strange message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. It has taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. 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. No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. Using the of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. Morse '._._.' The word simply has no meaning in any language, not even in Morse code. 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. The Theory Solve the Mystery of STENDEC STENDEC Theories On August 2, 1947, Stardust 's radio operator sent a final message in Morse code to the Chilean radio operator then on duty in 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. it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. - / . / -.. / . 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. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information / / -.-. They were flying across the Andes from east to west the pilots thought they were much further west than they were and turned north straight into the mountains and collided with a peak. . Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. 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. / . 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. 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. It has to be this one in my opinion. 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. The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. 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. 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. / -. Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. . Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. / -.-. The Chilean operator remarks that Harmer sends the final transmission very quickly.A rule of morse operation is that you don't send faster than the receiving operator can decipher.It appears Harmer did send too quickly, even while repeating. 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. 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. Again, this is the same as ST, only with different spacing.- (V) The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. of Stendec. The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. 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. BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved 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. 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. 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.". Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. / - /. Why would the operator say end? 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. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although of mystery, confusion and intrigue ever since. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. 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. As for the Avro Tudor, its safety record was deplorable even at the time. Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared 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. And even less likely that the same morse dyslexia would be repeated [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. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent.