Kevin Duffus
Kevin Duffus is a noted North Carolina author, documentary filmmaker, and research historian who has made numerous historical discoveries.
While in high school, he searched for but did not find the lost German U-boat U-352 off Cape Lookout; but he did find, explore, and identify a sunken Confederate gunboat near the Tar River. He also found the grave of the pirate Blackbeard’s mythical sister.
In the 1980s, as the executive producer of a Raleigh TV station, he produced for North Carolina’s 400th Anniversary live broadcasts from Manteo, and from England where he interviewed Mrs. Walter Raleigh Gilbert in the castle where the first Elizabethan voyages to America were conceived and planned.
In 2002, he solved what was said to be “one of the greatest mysteries of American lighthouse history” and located and identified the nation’s most historic lighthouse lens—the 1853 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Fresnel lens missing since the Civil War. As a result of his efforts, the lens has been preserved at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum at Hatteras village.
Kevin is the author of ten books on the maritime history of the Carolinas featuring lighthouses, shipwrecks, pirates, and German U-boats in World War I and World War II.
He has appeared on National Geographic’s “Expedition Unknown;” on the Discovery Channel’s documentary series, “Hitler’s American Battleground;” and History Channel’s, “History’s Greatest Mysteries.”
His documentary films have been honored by the George Foster Peabody Award, the World Hunger Media Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award and the National Education Association Award. In 2014, he was named NC Historian of the Year by the North Carolina Society of Historians.
