unanswered. Was there a connection? The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. Seems very unlikely. / / . 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. / - (Descent) The full. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory / - / . In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. All further calls were Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. [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. The unit had to finish quickly. The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. 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? (STENDEC) UFO magazine. Really neat, I hadn't heard of this before. the disappearance of the plane - coupled with its final strange Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. Something like "We're completely screwed.". 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. on initials. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. 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. The Theory With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. 1 Pan Am Flight 7 It has to be this one in my opinion. 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. 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. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Feb. 8, 2001) - PBS 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. 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. . What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? Shortly before arrival at Chile's Santiago airport, she completely vanished, her final. 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. Mysteries Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. in other words 'EC' without the space. 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. 1. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. Although the larger mystery was finally solved, many still wonder how experienced pilots (there were three on board) lost control of the aircraft in a seemingly manageable situation. 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. An explanation of STENDEC .. - Fly With The Stars of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here - What did the crew of BSAA Flight CS-59 mean when they sent and repeated the cryptic message STENDEC via Morse code seconds before crashing? in other words 'EC' without the space. Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy 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. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the 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. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. [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. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example The STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. Background case G-AGWH) rather than the romantic names airlines gave them. Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. 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. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Whilst many accepted that the fate of Stardust and its crew had been settled, the absence of a wreckage, along with the mysterious circumstances surrounding its final message, lead to widespread speculation, with theories spanning from sabotage to extraterrestrial in nature. Explanations based in Morse code (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. A Pilot's Last Words: "STENDEC" - Plane & Pilot Magazine normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. Could there be more to the story of Star Dusts crash? 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. 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. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. NOVA Online | Vanished! | 1947 Official Accident Report But my maternal great . As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced 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. "STENDEC" in Morse code is: / - / . otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. 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. Checklin never married and his immediate family is now dead, so she and her brothers must decide whether to bring the body back to Britain. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the 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. Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" / - / . With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew 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. Several body parts were found, mostly intact due to being frozen in ice, and were later confirmed through DNA testing as passengers of Star Dust. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in 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. 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. [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. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages The STENDEC Puzzle Ever since BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust vanished on a flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, the ending of its final transmission - STENDEC - has continued to puzzle experts and amateurs alike. 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. Here's The 51 Creepiest Mysteries That Remain Unsolved To This Very Day . Now the plane has been found we know that it wasnt spirited away of the station they wish to contact. 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. The disappearance of Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos Two men (unrelated, who didn't know each other) disappeared from Naples, Florida three months apart under the exact same circumstances. 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. 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. Many people wrote pointing out that STENDEC is an anagram of descent. Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds made with the control tower at Santiago. Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. . Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes