Knut Haugland Heyerdahl in 1944 at a paramilitary training camp in England. It was here that Haugland first heard of Heyerdahl's theories about Polynesian migration patterns, and his plans to cross the Pacific on a balsa wood raft. In 1947 Haugland was invited by Heyerdahl to join the Kon-Tiki expedition as a radio operator. On the expedition Haugland and Torstein Raaby (another former resistance member) were in frequent radio contact with American amateur operators, sending meteorological and hydrographic data to be passed on to the Meteorological Institute in Washington, DC. Despite the tiny radio which had an output of only 6 watts,
Kon-Tiki expedition the French schooner "Tamara", with the salvaged "Kon-Tiki" in tow. Heyerdahl believed that the original inhabitants of Easter Island were migrants from Peru. He argued that the monumental statues known as moai resembled sculptures more typical of pre-Columbian Peru than any Polynesian designs. He believed that the Easter Island myth of a power struggle between two peoples called the Hanau epe and Hanau momoko was a memory of conflicts between the original inhabitants of the island and a later wave of Native Americans from the Northwest coast, eventually leading to the annihilation of the Hanau epe and the destruction of