[Marc]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]Now that you mention it, yes, very close in both time and location. Fortunately, (I think) Von Däniken isn't around to come out with a new book: In Search of Ancient Romulans[/quoteost_uid0]

A more down-to-earth explanation of what happened at the end of the Trojan War is that the story of the "wooden horse" is a garbled account of the use by the Greeks of a wooden siege tower to breach the city's walls. This technology was unknown to the Greeks, but it could well have been provided to them by mercenary soldiers from the older civilizations of Anatolia and Mesopotamia -- including the Hittites.

The Hittite kingdom collapsed around 1190, right around the time of the traditional dates for the Trojan War (1193 to 1184), so there may have been a lot of unemployed Hittite soldiers and military engineers looking for work in that area who could have been hired by the Greek army as "siege consultants" (in what could be called an early example of private-sector outsourcing.)[/colorost_uid0]