Intriguing mysteries and conspiracy theories
Nov 26, 2021 17:15:15 GMT
Lord Emsworth, smogquixote, and 1 more like this
Post by politician2 on Nov 26, 2021 17:15:15 GMT
I rather like a good mystery, so maybe we should have a thread discussing some odd and seemingly inexplicable incidents?
Let's start with a British South American Airways flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago on 2 August 1947. (This is quite a famous case, so many people may already know about it, in which case please ignore the next few paragraphs.)
At 17:41 the Chilean Air Traffic Controller received a Morse code message from the plane: "ETA SANTIAGO 1745 STENDEC". The first part of the message was straightforward enough, indicating that the plane was on its final approach and was about to touch down in Santiago. However, the second part left the Controller baffled: "stendec" is not a word in any known language, nor is it a technical aviation term, and nor is it a recognised acronym for anything. Puzzled, the Controller requested clarification and got the same word back twice in quick succession: "STENDEC STENDEC".
The plane never landed.
For decades, the plane was believed to have disappeared into thin air on the outskirts of a major world city and was considered by some commentators to be an example of alien abduction. In this context, "stendec" took on a sinister meaning, with some people believing it was a word in the aliens' language or the letters printed on whatever craft intercepted the plane.
However, the mystery was solved in 1998 when an Andean glacier moved and disgorged the remains of the plane. What had happened was quite simple: the pilots were using dead reckoning to calculate their position and had flown higher than normal on the day in question due to severe turbulence. This had taken them into the jet stream, whose effects were not fully understood at the time. As a result of the headwinds, they were still crossing the Andes when they thought they were approaching Santiago: unable to see the ground due to cloud cover, they descended through clouds and flew straight into a mountain-top.
However, none of this explains "stendec" and there is still much discussion over what it meant. Some sources believe that the sender was attempting to type "descent", which is a perfect anagram, and was suffering from hypoxia to cause the error, but there was no reason to end the message with that word and there is no evidence that the crew were suffering from hypoxia (which would have been very unlikely to cause the same error three times in a row in any case). Others believe that the crew were attempting to send the aircraft's name Stardust, which has three letters in the same places, but aircraft use their codes rather than names in communications and the plane's code was G-AGWH. Still others argue that "STENDEC" was some form of acronym, standing for something like "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Entering Cloud" and have even posited that this was a common term used in the RAF, but there is no evidence to support this and no reason the crew would have sent an acronym to somebody who had no possibility of understanding. Finally – and this is the one I believe – some people have argued that whilst you can take the man out of public school and the RAF you can't take the public school and the RAF out of the man and the radio operator, bored after a long and uneventful flight, was having a jolly jape with Johnny Foreigner and sending a made-up word to confuse Chilean ATC. If this is the case, the unusual word and crash immediately afterwards were completely unconnected and had the plane landed normally an explanation would have been offered.
What does everyone else think? Does anybody have some equally intriguing mysteries to offer?
Let's start with a British South American Airways flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago on 2 August 1947. (This is quite a famous case, so many people may already know about it, in which case please ignore the next few paragraphs.)
At 17:41 the Chilean Air Traffic Controller received a Morse code message from the plane: "ETA SANTIAGO 1745 STENDEC". The first part of the message was straightforward enough, indicating that the plane was on its final approach and was about to touch down in Santiago. However, the second part left the Controller baffled: "stendec" is not a word in any known language, nor is it a technical aviation term, and nor is it a recognised acronym for anything. Puzzled, the Controller requested clarification and got the same word back twice in quick succession: "STENDEC STENDEC".
The plane never landed.
For decades, the plane was believed to have disappeared into thin air on the outskirts of a major world city and was considered by some commentators to be an example of alien abduction. In this context, "stendec" took on a sinister meaning, with some people believing it was a word in the aliens' language or the letters printed on whatever craft intercepted the plane.
However, the mystery was solved in 1998 when an Andean glacier moved and disgorged the remains of the plane. What had happened was quite simple: the pilots were using dead reckoning to calculate their position and had flown higher than normal on the day in question due to severe turbulence. This had taken them into the jet stream, whose effects were not fully understood at the time. As a result of the headwinds, they were still crossing the Andes when they thought they were approaching Santiago: unable to see the ground due to cloud cover, they descended through clouds and flew straight into a mountain-top.
However, none of this explains "stendec" and there is still much discussion over what it meant. Some sources believe that the sender was attempting to type "descent", which is a perfect anagram, and was suffering from hypoxia to cause the error, but there was no reason to end the message with that word and there is no evidence that the crew were suffering from hypoxia (which would have been very unlikely to cause the same error three times in a row in any case). Others believe that the crew were attempting to send the aircraft's name Stardust, which has three letters in the same places, but aircraft use their codes rather than names in communications and the plane's code was G-AGWH. Still others argue that "STENDEC" was some form of acronym, standing for something like "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Entering Cloud" and have even posited that this was a common term used in the RAF, but there is no evidence to support this and no reason the crew would have sent an acronym to somebody who had no possibility of understanding. Finally – and this is the one I believe – some people have argued that whilst you can take the man out of public school and the RAF you can't take the public school and the RAF out of the man and the radio operator, bored after a long and uneventful flight, was having a jolly jape with Johnny Foreigner and sending a made-up word to confuse Chilean ATC. If this is the case, the unusual word and crash immediately afterwards were completely unconnected and had the plane landed normally an explanation would have been offered.
What does everyone else think? Does anybody have some equally intriguing mysteries to offer?
