Post #300971 by Kong-Tiki on Sun, Apr 22, 2007 2:52 AM

Now that you mention it....
there WAS contact between Thor Heyerdahl and Nazi Germany's pesudo-scientist before the war. After Heyerdahl had been living on the Marquesas Islands in the thirties, he visited Germany and presented racial scientist Hans Guenther with a skull from one of the natives. He also wrote a letter to his mother in which he states that Guenther " is one of the leading men of the new Reich".
This information was revealed in Ragnar Kvams biography "Thor Heyerdahl, the Man and the Ocean", in late 2005. Kvam writes that Heyerdahl's decision to provide anthropological material to one of Hitler's leading racial scientists showed a distinct "lack of intuition" and "evidence of a political naivete," .
When Norway was attacked by Germany in 1940, Heyerdahl joined the resistance. He never did express any extreme political views.
Your assumption that there is a sort of Norwegian conspiracy to defend all things Thor, is simply wrong, however. The Kon Tiki Expedition was controversial and strongly criticised in the Norwegian press and at the universities, before the movie made him a star in the rest of the world.
His theories are considered just that, also at the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo. Dr Ingjerd Hoem, head of research at the Museum , told the Norwegian daily Aftenposten just this weekend that "Heyerdahls theories about the population of the Paciffic has been debunked".
Before his death in 2002, Heyerdahl had some new, entertaining theories about the orgin of the Norse mythology, that pissed off a lot of Norewgian scientists.