on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. tower aircraft now descending entering cloud") / -.. / . Discussion in other words 'EC' without the space. A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. . 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. Other explanations for the appearance 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! The Theory Was there a connection? Now the plane has been found we know that it wasnt spirited away 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. In January 2000, they located the site and began recovering debris. The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source attention, and another signing off. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. Another explanation, advanced at the time of the disappearance, [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. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in . Morse '._._.' To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). 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. 1947 BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust accident - Wikipedia 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. / -. The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. full message sent at 17.41 hrs was as follows: This gives us the very This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. 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. one mystery still remains. 9 Mysterious Plane Crashes - Listverse the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer So mysterious was the disappearance of the plane - coupled with it's final strange message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. Its fate became one of the most puzzling aviation mysteries of its time. 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. [18], Star Dust is likely to have flown into a nearly vertical snowfield near the top of the glacier, causing an avalanche that buried the wreckage within seconds and concealed it from searchers. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. close to an understanding of the message. 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. Voice "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" But before that, to help understand the / -.-. - . problem, here is a website which translates English into Morse code. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. / -. 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. in other words 'EC' without the space. All these variations seem implausible to a greater or lesser extent. . 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. 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. The Disappearance of Flight CS-59. The "STENDEC" Mystery Their curse was too much sky. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . This is, in my opinion, the most plausible theory of what STENDEC was supposed to be. Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code - Reddit Then nothing. It would have been This was the case in 1947 when an airliner crashed in the Andes, killing everyone aboard. British . / . If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. Mrs Coalwood said: "He was my older cousin, who I idolised hopelessly. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely 1 Pan Am Flight 7 USGS. out, but seems unlikely. However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . Whilst its possible that STENDEC could mean any one of these phrases, theres nothing definitive I can find which suggests that this phrase ever meant anything previously, making it more unlikely that this word was used intentionally at all. They hadn't passed Curico. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! method of signalling a late arrival amongst RAF radio operators.. / - / .- / .-.. / .- / - / . It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had While the fate of Star Dust had finally been solved, remaining in its wake was still the mystery of the crews final messageSTENDEC. Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish SAR Technology - Aviation Cold Case Response The full. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space The searchers discovered one propeller, its tips scarred and bent backward, indicating that the prop had been revolving when the Lancastrian plowed into the Tupungato glacier. Again, this is the same as ST, only with different spacing.- (V) [3][pageneeded], Star Dust carried six passengers and a crew of five on its final flight. Before this message a series of entirely routine messages had been (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. 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. 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 taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. 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. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). Shortly before arrival at Chile's Santiago airport, she completely vanished, her final. 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 sentence now makes perfect sense, with Harmer announcing that they were expected to arrive in Santiago at 17:45 hours, at Los Cerrillos Airport. And why not 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. 20 passengers and crew were lost. The Mystery of STENDEC - Skeptoid My god, I'm still just sort of dumbfounded by how good and informative this post is. The Theory According to experts, if an additional space had been added between the first two letters, STENDEC would translate to: ATTENTION END END OF MESSAGE. It seems a bit redundant to say END and then END OF MESSAGE, however. They had been . Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? operator to scramble the message. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. - . /-.-. 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). In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. 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. When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. The radio operator meant to say Stardust. Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space 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. / -. INITIALS Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Even if exchanges between two operators become conversational, the operator writes the reply before sending it.From this, and from standard morse procedure, Harmer's transmission would be to inform Stardust's ETA, destination city, airport code SCTI ( Los Cerillos), and conclude with prosign AR (dit dah, dit dah dit) to end transmission. The Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube With the plane supposedly minutes away from the airport, the final word from the Lancastrian became shrouded in mystery when the plane, along with everyone on board, vanished into thin air. The North Texas Skeptic 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 Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. [23], "Stendec" redirects here. The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. I personally believe that the word was a misinterpretation of the code, but theories span far and wide on what the now notorious phrase stood for. The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. 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. And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. 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. 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. 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. In 1997, an ultra-low frequency, weird but loud noise . 1947 an British South American Airways aircraft named Star Dust disappeared, it's last message was simply "STENDEC". 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. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew [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. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. 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. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in Discussion / / -.-. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. this method of communication. The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. Sign up for our newsletter, full of tips, reviews and more! Its certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. An explanation of STENDEC .. - Fly With The Stars All Rights Reserved I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. 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.