None of it is a single smoking gun. Taken together, it explains why serious researchers are focused on Nikumaroro.
Radio Bearings That Cross Over One Island
The first category of evidence is radio direction-finding data collected in the days after the disappearance.
Stations to the north — including Wake Island, Midway and Hawaii — had radio bearing capability, meaning they could determine the direction a signal was coming from.
“If you plot the direction of those bearings, you see a series of lines that pass very closely together over Gardner Island,” Pettigrew explained.
That convergence was taken seriously at the time. It is one reason Navy pilots flew over the island in the days that followed.
“If you plot the direction of those bearings, you see a series of lines that pass very closely together over Gardner Island. That’s a good piece of evidence. There’s a reason Navy pilots actually flew over the island in the days that followed.”
Rick Pettigrew · at Seat at the Table
Over 100 Reported Radio Messages
The second category is the content of the messages themselves.
Some were minimal — a carrier wave, or a faint sound that seemed like a voice without intelligible words. Others were more specific. Pettigrew noted there are well over 100 recorded instances of post-loss signals, including messages picked up by ordinary people in the United States and Canada who happened to be tuning a shortwave radio.
The most documented example is Betty Klenck, a 15-year-old girl in St. Petersburg, Florida.
- Her father had strung roughly 100 feet of antenna wire in the backyard to pull in distant signals
- While turning the dial, she came across someone claiming to be Amelia Earhart asking for help
- She listened for an extended period and brought her father in to listen with her
- She recorded what she heard in a diary that has been preserved to the present day
The reception was uneven, the way distant shortwave often is. Some sentences were clear, others garbled. She and her father tried to alert the authorities and were essentially told not to worry about it.
That detail matters. A contemporaneous, handwritten account from a teenager with no stake in the outcome is exactly the kind of source that survives scrutiny better than a retold story.
The Bevington Object
Three months after the disappearance, in October 1937, a British survey party landed on the island to assess it as a possible colony site.
They walked the island, surveyed it, and recorded something unexpected: a place that looked like a recent bivouac. This was an uninhabited island with no one known to be living on it, and they documented the site anyway.
As the party departed, a man named Bevington photographed the northwestern part of the island, including the wreck of the Norwich City, which had washed ashore in 1929.
On the reef in that photograph, there is something small and dark that does not belong. When the image was processed and analyzed, the object looked very much like the landing gear of an Electra.
Artifacts Found on the Island
Fieldwork on the island has produced additional material from an area where a storm appears to have washed artifacts ashore:
- An American flashlight consistent with 1930s manufacture
- A woman’s leather shoe in the style and size Amelia was known to wear
- A Bourjois cosmetics jar manufactured in Paris in the 1930s — three of these have been found on the island
Context matters for the last one. Beginning in 1938, the island was inhabited by Gilbertese colonists brought in by the British, who remained until 1963. As Pettigrew put it, it is hard to imagine that the women among those colonists were using French cosmetics from Paris.
Why the Pattern Is the Point
Pettigrew was careful about his own role, noting that he was associated with only some of this work and not most of it. That restraint is part of what makes the case compelling.
The strength of the evidence is not in any single artifact. It is that radio bearings, more than 100 intercepted messages, a 1937 photograph, and physical artifacts all converge on one uninhabited island.
That convergence is why a team is now preparing to go back and look at the object in the lagoon directly.
A Seat at the Table for Conversations That Matter
Rick Pettigrew’s presentation is a reminder of what happens when evidence is presented plainly and allowed to speak for itself. That is the point of Seat at The Table: putting Indiana leaders in the room with the people doing the work.
If you would like to be part of conversations like this one, explore the Seat at The Table series and connect with the Sease Gerig team.
