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. 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. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). 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. [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. the operator use a calling up sign in the middle of his message? / - (Descent) to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before 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. "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. 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. USGS. [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. / -.. / . The radio operator meant to say Stardust. 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. Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. / -. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. Thanks SK. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. The Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport Using the between the letters). 1947 an British South American Airways aircraft named Star Dust disappeared, it's last message was simply "STENDEC". of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here - I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. 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. 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. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. a new clue the truth is we will never know for sure what that final 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! 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. For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. / . 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. Explanations based in Morse code Without rearranging any of the inputs, and just separating the spacing differently, you can come up with the phrase SCTI AR. some similarities both in Morse code and English /- /.-/ .-./ -../ ..-/ / - (Stardust) Top 10 Intriguing Mysteries Of South America - Listverse 10 of the Strangest Mysteries That Were Solved Later - Unbelievable Facts Star Dust, registration G-AGWH, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, departed Buenos Aires for Santiago at 13.46 on 2 August 1947. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) 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. [8], Star Dust left Buenos Aires at 1:46 pm on 2 August. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. The site had been difficult to reach. 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. 2023 Madavor Media, LLC. 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. 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. As only one young woman was on board, it was assumed to have been that of Iris Moreen Evans, a 26-year-old from the Rhondda valley. Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? If they wanted to convey distress, they would have sent an SOS., Misinterpretation Theory Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. It was also, as OP says, unpressurized, so that passengers as well as crew had to breathe supplemental oxygen through masks while above 15,000 feet. 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. And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes The unit had to finish quickly. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. (ETA LATE) Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. 2023 Little Green Footballs Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. 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. It seems 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. 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. NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Jan. 31, 2001) - PBS . In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. Discussion The Morse for AR is.- /.-. 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". An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. 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 even inspired a new name for a UFO magazineSTENDEK. 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. 10 'Unsolved' Mysteries That Have Been Solved | HowStuffWorks Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. 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. 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. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? / . It would be like ending a story with once upon a time., Conclusion This gives us the very just confirmed his time of arrival? I was a radio operator aboard an R.A.N. 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. - - . Something like "We're completely screwed.". When flying at high altitudes, oxygen molecules are harder to inhale, and if a plane is not pressurized, it can lead to hypoxia, a condition which can impair or even completely destroy your ability to function. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Sometimes These Enigmas Never Decipher. / -.-. This gives us the very 2023 Little Green Footballs But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code Spektator 13K subscribers Subscribe 20K views 1 year ago #Documentary #Mystery When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, its. Once again, no distress signal was received. BBC - Science & Nature - Horizon - Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared 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. 'ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs STENDEC' begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code 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. The problem? / -. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. 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. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. All Rights Reserved normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name 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. Then nothing. . 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. based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with 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. this method of communication. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. 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. Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. 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. This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. / . 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). The On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. 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. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. In 1950, one of these, Star Girl, had no fewer than 83 passengers and crew crammed into it on a charter flight from Dublin to Llandow, a low-cost airport near Cardiff in Wales. 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. NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Feb. 8, 2001) - PBS Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. 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. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie Weird December 2010 Views: 31,881 Tweet 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. Already a member? Sign up for our newsletter, full of tips, reviews and more! 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. (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.). 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. The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. How police solved the mystery of a VHS tape depicting sexual assault The full. Become a member and get exclusive access to articles, contests and more! aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts How police solved the mystery of a VHS tape depicting sexual assault. The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source NOVA Online | Vanished! | STENDEC Theories - PBS That's also how Carole Lombard died. Mystery solved. Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. 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.