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. Voice INITIALS I was a radio operator aboard an R.A.N. Furthermore, Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. 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. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. Why would STENDEC is the same Morse as SCTI AR if you don't consider any spacing between characters. 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. Five of the eight British victims have been identified. BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved . But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code | When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, it's unusual last message leaves the world with a 70 year old mystery still waiting to be solved. The Lancastrian was an unpressurized aircraft, meaning that the crew and passengers could have been subject to hypoxia had their oxygen system failed, and so some suggest that this may have led to Harmer sending parts of his final message in a confused state. Sign up for our newsletter, full of tips, reviews and more! Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. 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. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting 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. Discussion this method of communication. / -.. / . To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). 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. Now the plane has been found we know that it wasnt spirited away You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. of Stendec. Scherer, J. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling 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. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name
The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. / . Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely Perhaps STENDEC was an abbreviation for a much longer message, an acronym sent in a hurry due to being in a crunch for time. 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.". 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. 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. And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only Weird December 2010 Views: 31,751. The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. amusing messages based on using STENDEC as a series of initials: 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. For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing". and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. Once again, no distress signal was received. of mystery, confusion and intrigue ever since. "STENDEC Solved." The North Texas Skeptic. 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. 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. Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie Weird December 2010 Views: 31,837 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. The most widely speculated of these phrases is the following: Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash Landing. . close to an understanding of the message. Ball lightning. 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. Just before the plane disappeared, it very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who 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. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . The last word in Star Dust's final Morse code transmission to Santiago airport, "STENDEC", was received by the airport control tower four minutes before its planned landing and repeated twice; it has never been satisfactorily explained. based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. Is that the one where they all started eating each other? code. 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. 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. This was the case in 1947 when an airliner crashed in the Andes, killing everyone aboard. 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. / -. As for the Avro Tudor, its safety record was deplorable even at the time. 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. on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was It also seems clear that the message was not anticipating a crash, Below we include a 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. of the station they wish to contact. [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). Its civil certificate of airworthiness (CofA) number 7282 was issued on 1 January 1946. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. STENDEC." That was the last communication sent in Morse code on August 2, 1947, by an Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft flying for British South American Airways from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile. radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf _. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. It seems 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? tower aircraft now descending entering cloud") In Britain, the news led to a hunt for surviving relatives. makes clear, modern science has answered most of the questions surrounding the 1947 crash of the civilian aircraft Stardust in the Andes east of Santiago, Chile. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. It has to be this one in my opinion. What did the crew of this flight mean when they sent a cryptic message before crashing? / -.. / . STENDECANAGRAMS enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. 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. Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory 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. 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. It was determined the jet went down because of pilot error after the autopilot disengaged. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given The Avro Lancastrian was a civilian version of the wartime Lancaster heavy bomber. 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. / - / . If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. 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. Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. - / . Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. Due to the poor visibility caused by the storm, its possible that the crew were unaware that their plane was on course to collide with the mountainside, and unknowingly plummeted the aircraft into the summit before eventually succumbing to the elements. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. 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. "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. . Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. [23], "Stendec" redirects here. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). 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. 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. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. / -. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Their curse was too much sky. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. 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. That would leave just "END", sandwiched between a signal attracting 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. Another explanation, advanced at the time of the disappearance, 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 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. 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! 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. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable even has an entry for STENDEC. Dozens of books and articles have examined the evidence, turned it over, twisted it, rearranged the letters, and drawn a blank. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. 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. "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago End Credits. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based -, Press J to jump to the feed. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. 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. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. 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. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic One final mystery lay in the last message sent out by the Star Dust. / - / . STENDEC - Solved?! much harder in Morse code.-.. / . /-.-. 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. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? by John . the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer
Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. As mentioned in a previous theory, morse code can be easily misinterpreted if incorrectly spaced or misheard by the receiver. The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. This gives us the very
/ / -.-. 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. 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. So mysterious was Thanks SK. of the station they wish to contact. For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here -
Mrs Coalwood said: "He was my older cousin, who I idolised hopelessly. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. 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. / / . The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. Then nothing. 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. [9] This leg of the flight was apparently uneventful until the radio operator (Harmer) sent a routine message in Morse code to the airport in Santiago at 5:41 pm, announcing an expected arrival of 5:45 pm. But there are no old, bold pilots. / -.. / . 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. Something like "We're completely screwed.". In January 2000, they located the site and began recovering debris. Then nothing. 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. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. unanswered. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. 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. But before that, to help understand the Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space
In January 2000, a 100-man search party from the Argentine Army clambered 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) up Tupungato Mountain, a 6,552-meter (21,490-foot) volcano, where it located parts of the plane, as well as human bones, at the base of a glacier. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher.