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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. And even less likely that the same morse dyslexia would be repeated But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. - / . British . / - /. 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. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. 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. 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. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. STENDEC is the same Morse as SCTI AR if you don't consider any spacing between characters. [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. 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. What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. 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. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. You're right! Ball lightning. 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. 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. Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in (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.). Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? Their curse was too much sky. Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. 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. It seems Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. It was underpowered, unstable in yaw on the ground (pilots of the Tudor got used to feeding in power at different levels from each engine on takeoff to prevent the beast from departing uncontrollably off the side of the runway), unpleasant to handle in the air, prone to leaks of all kinds, and an ergonomic and maintenance nightmare. Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes The Theory out very fast. For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. [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. 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. . 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"). 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. STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. Once again, no distress signal was received. A common example of this would be SOS, which is the internationally recognised distress signal in morse code to call for help. The experienced crew of the "Stardust" apparently realized the plane was off course in a northerly direction (it was found eighty kilometers off its flight path), or they purposely departed from the charted route to avoid bad weather. The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. They were finally grounded in 1959, unsurprisingly after yet another ex-BSAA Tudor flew into a Turkish mountain, for reasons that remain unclear, killing all on board. The theory 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). . Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. of the station they wish to contact. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name / -. 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. 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. More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts. 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. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. / / -.-. Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved That would leave just "END", sandwiched between a signal attracting Already a member? They had been . just confirmed his time of arrival? Was there a connection? 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. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting 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. / -. 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. Background clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. 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. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. -, Press J to jump to the feed. that Morse transmissions were closing down. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had What did the crew of this flight mean when they sent a cryptic message before crashing? that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. 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. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. All these variations seem implausible to a greater or lesser extent. The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. 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. /-.-. 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. . A mix of misinterpretation and a lack of recent knowledge led to the operator instead hearing the term STENDEC, which, combined with the disappearance of the plane, led to one of South Americas greatest aviation mysteries. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds - /. three times.STENDEC/Stardust 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. [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. 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. the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never 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. Could there be more to the story of Star Dusts crash? out, but seems unlikely. 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. So mysterious was the disappearance of the plane - coupled with it's final strange message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. 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. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. /- (ST) 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. Scherer, J. As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code 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". 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. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. Many people wrote pointing out that STENDEC is an anagram of descent. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information It appears the Chilean operator couldn't decipher the signoff because of these factors. in other words 'EC' without the space. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. 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. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. up sign. 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. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? After this, British civil aviation authorities withdrew the Tudor's certification to carry passengers, and the few remaining examples concluded their operational service as cargo and tanker aircraft. The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the / -.-. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. 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. This gives us the very At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. between the letters). The radio operator misheard the signal. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. 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. Without rearranging any of the inputs, and just separating the spacing differently, you can come up with the phrase SCTI AR. [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. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. - /. 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. [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. much harder in Morse code.-.. / . [13] Some BSAA pilots, however, expressed scepticism at this theory; convinced that Cook would not have started his descent without a positive indication that he had crossed the mountains; they have suggested that strong winds may have brought down the craft in some other way. The Theory / - /. message from Star Dust -. Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. / -. case G-AGWH) rather than the romantic names airlines gave them. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. [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). 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. That's also how Carole Lombard died. I was a radio operator aboard an R.A.N. 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. All further calls were 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? 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. . A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. / - / . (STENDEC) It has taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". It would have been [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. / -. [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". Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. 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. Furthermore, INITIALS The theory is the pilot mistakenly plotted their course as if they were leaving from a different airport, and it led to them crashing into a mountain. An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. 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. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. That part of the puzzle wouldnt be solved until half a century later. Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident. Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world.