Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. 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. 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. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. (STENDEC) At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. Scherer, J. The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. - / . (STENDEC) Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting Was there a connection? 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. . This theory is an easy one to break apart. _._. 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. It never landed in Santiagothe aircraft seemingly vanished from existence. Americas owner-flown aircraft enthusiasts and active-pilot resource, delivered to your inbox! . The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. 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. [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. That part of the puzzle wouldnt be solved until half a century later. 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. 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. Dear NOVA, I am a radio amateur who actively uses the Morse Code. 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. For other uses, see, Discovery of wreckage and reconstruction of the crash, "Pilot finally cleared over mystery of 1947 mountain plane disaster", "Aircraft operated by British South American Airways", "DNA clues reveal 55-year-old secrets behind crash of the Star Dust", "Vanished: 1947 Official Accident Report", "I Am Alive: The Crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571", Ministry of Civil Aviation official report on the accident, 1948, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident&oldid=1142432641, This page was last edited on 2 March 2023, at 10:00. Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. 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. Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. up sign. Whilst a reasonable theory on the surface, its unfortunately also quite reasonable to discredit. BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. between the letters). Five months after the episode described by OP, one of BSAA's Avro Tudor IV aircraft, Star Tiger, with 31 persons on board, vanished on a flight from Lisbon to Bermuda with an intermediate fuel stop in the Azores. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information . 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. / -.-. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . 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. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). In 1997, an ultra-low frequency, weird but loud noise . The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. 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. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. 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 / -.. / . Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts. But there are no old, bold pilots. Despite Stardusts fate now fully resolved, the mystery of STENDEC is still argued to this day, with no definitive conclusion on what Dennis Harmer was intending to communicate that evening. [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. radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is 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. to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before 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. Could it be that Stardust were informing Los Cerrillos that they were on course for Rodelillo Airfield near Valparaiso instead, diverging from their original route? That would leave just "END", sandwiched between a signal attracting 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. The International Civil Aviation Organisation had only recently implemented the airline code for Los Cerrillos just four months prior to the event in April 1947, so its more than possible that the airports radio operator was not yet familiar with the term and failed to recognise it. (STENDEC). You're right! As the compressed snow turned to ice, the wreckage would have been incorporated into the body of the glacier, with fragments emerging many years later and much further down the mountain. [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. It would have been 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. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. All further calls were The in other words 'EC' without the space. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. 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. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. 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. Hence we have: 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. [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. 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. 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. - . - / . 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. - / . Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. 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. Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. 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. 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. 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". 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. And if there was any meaning to it, it wasnt in regards to the crash. 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. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. 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 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. 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. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. All rights reserved. 56K views 8 months ago #Disasters #History For over 50 years the fate of Flight CS-59 remained a mystery. 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. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? Four letter ICAO codes for airports had 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. It was the manicured hand of a young woman lying among the ice and rocks. STENDEC and Stardust have 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. As mentioned in a previous theory, morse code can be easily misinterpreted if incorrectly spaced or misheard by the receiver. _. On this ill-fated day, a British South American Airways airliner called Star Dust carrying six passengers and five crew members crashed during its journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago. / / -.-. [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". [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. Mysteries /- (ST) Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. Discussion this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio / -.. / . Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. / - /. The site had been difficult to reach. For a more detailed explanation close to an understanding of the message. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. This gives us the very (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 Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. 1947 an British South American Airways aircraft named Star Dust disappeared, it's last message was simply "STENDEC". "STENDEC" in Morse code is: / - / . "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. The STENDEC mystery, referring to the cryptic message sent by a Lancastrian airliner before it vanished in the Andes, is a staple of the UFO culture. in other words 'EC' without the space. much harder in Morse code.-.. / . The Foreign Office yesterday confirmed that after initially unsuccessful attempts, Argentinian scientists have found close family matches. STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. 1 Pan Am Flight 7 The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] Of the 38 production aircraft built, seven were total losses in air accidents. 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. Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. The flight itself was the last leg of a journey which originated from London, with the trip across the Atlantic taking place in a York aircraft, transferring to the Stardust for the crossing of the Andes Mountains. A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. 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. Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. . One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. 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. 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. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. 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. The Theory Its certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. Neither men were taken to the jail. code. Furthermore, aircraft were usually referred to by their registration, which in Stardusts case was G-AGWH, rather than the more romantic monikers the airline had given them. 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. / -.-. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. Theories include everything from sabotage to aliens. Was there a connection? 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. - . STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory It even inspired a new name for a UFO magazineSTENDEK. 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. USGS. 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. [8], Star Dust left Buenos Aires at 1:46 pm on 2 August. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given Seems very unlikely. The losing the first two dots) yields ETA LATE - apparently a common In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. [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. aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. STENDEC - Solved?! Sometimes These Enigmas Never Decipher. operator to scramble the message. With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. / - / . Earlier this week Margaret Coalwood of Nottingham, now 70, was told that DNA extracted from blood samples taken from her last year had identified the remains of her cousin, Donald Checklin. Discussion / . Many people wrote pointing out that STENDEC is an anagram of descent. three times.STENDEC/Stardust same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in Using the Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. They hadn't passed Curico. Plane and Pilot expands upon the vast base of knowledge and experience from aviations most reputable influencers to inspire, educate, entertain and inform. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based 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.". 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. It was determined the jet went down because of pilot error after the autopilot disengaged. Now the plane has been found we know that it wasnt spirited away 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. Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. "[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. 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. The radio operator meant to say Stardust. [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. Ball lightning is a potentially dangerous atmospheric electrical phenomenon. Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. 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. The word [10], The staff of the BBC television series Horizonwhich presented an episode in 2000 on the Star Dust disappearancereceived hundreds of messages from viewers proposing explanations of "STENDEC". it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. / -. - / . 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.