'We just did what we had to do'

As the man who opened the Stargate twenty-five years ago, Dr. Daniel Jackson has become one of the most highly sought-after interview subjects of the decade. We caught up with him and his wife in their Colorado Springs home -- and the results weren't what you might think.

SUZANNE KOURENA | May, 2021
A Rolling Stone exclusive

LET ME TELL you, America: Daniel Jackson and Cameron Mitchell-Jackson are tough people to get a hold of. You wouldn't think they would be. Jackson has been fairly accessable to the press over the past two years, and Mitchell-Jackson (she uses her maiden name for professional purposes, but insisted I use both names in print) appears with her husband on a regular basis. But their appearances are rigorously scheduled, and they've both been brutally insistent on their conditions: Brief interviews only. No questions about their personal lives. And since the first six months after the Bregman documentary aired, they haven't been reachable through the Pentagon's press liaison. If you want to talk to them, you have to convince their personal assistant that you really, really mean it.

I put in my request through the man Mitchell-Jackson calls their "human firewall" without much hope. After all, I was asking for unfettered access to some of the most in-demand news figures of the decade, and Rolling Stone isn't Time or Newsweek. But twenty minutes after I sent my email, I received a reply -- not from a publicist or a personal assistant, but from Mitchell-Jackson's business partner, the other half of the eponymous software firm Nielson-Mitchell Solutions.

JD Nielson -- he declined to state what the initials stand for, but a little bit of investigation later revealed it to be "Jonathan Daniel" -- extended the hospitality of their home to me for an interview on one condition: that I spend my time entirely with them, rather than commuting back and forth to the house that is both their shared living quarters and their company's office complex. "every time we open the gates we get fleas and roaches," he wrote. (Nielson eschews capital letters in text, apparently as a matter of doctrine.) I somehow didn't think he meant members of the insect kingdom.

Mitchell-Jackson was the one to answer the door on my arrival. She's a tall woman, strong-featured and surprisingly compelling, and -- in a culture where youth is beauty -- makes no attempt to conceal her assorted wrinkles, scars, and gray hairs. She was wearing what I would quickly come to realize was close to being uniform-of-the-day in their household: workout pants and a tank top. (Nielson wears less; Jackson wears more.)

In her own home, she walks with slightly more confidence than she does in a public crowd, but she still carries -- and relies upon -- a cane, palm-gripped and padded for comfort, the relic of her 2004 encounter with an invasion fleet from outer space and a field of Antarctic ice. She showed me to the bedroom I'd be using for the duration of my week-long stay with them. In exchange for receiving access, I agreed that there would be no photographs or descriptions of their private areas -- and most of the doors remained closed and locked, anyway -- but the kitchen, where she led me next, apparently doesn't count as private. The best adjective to describe it is "cavernous". I've seen hotel kitchens and those in five-star restaurants that were less well-equipped.

I've also been in five-star restaurant kitchens that produced far worse food. Once settled at the kitchen table, she inquired whether I'd eaten lunch before my arrival -- I had -- and then proceeded to produce, in a whirlwind of energy: a tower of cookies, a pile of sandwiches (grilled Havarti cheese with dill and pesto, on bread irreguarly-shaped enough to be homemade), and a basket full of chips she turned from potatoes to potato chips right in front of my eyes. When I protested that I couldn't possibly eat all that food, she just shrugged. "Rampaging hoardes will be along in a minute," she said. "Let me just ring the dinner bell."

By which she meant that she would relay a message on their home network; their household runs on text, and there are terminals in every room. A few minutes later, I heard sudden voices drifting up from the stairs present in the corner of the kitchen, and a moment after that, both Jackson and Nielson joined us. The plates of food I thought would feed a small army had disappeared no more than fifteen minutes later -- and Nielson went back for seconds on the cookies.

WHAT STORY COULD I possibly find to tell about Daniel Jackson that hasn't been told already? That was the question I asked myself when I began this process. His personal history -- a history rife with tragedy and loss -- has become household gossip over the past two years. As it turns out, though, the Daniel Jackson who's appeared on all the talk shows and news magazines is only one side of the complex equation that makes up the man whom many call the patron saint of the Stargate. (A title he winces, and Nielson mocks, to hear.)

"I was the right person at the right place at the right time," Jackson says. "From there, all I did was try to do the right thing from there on out. Sometimes it was easier. Sometimes it was harder. Sometimes I didn't manage it at all." He looks off into the distance, and for a minute it seems as if he would stop talking, lost in thought. "I wasn't anything special," he adds. "None of us were. We just did what we had to do."

Mitchell-Jackson, seated at his side on the living room couch, reaches over to squeeze his knee. (The two of them are endlessly physically affectionate, with each other and with Nielson.) "Whole lot of heroes in that command," she says.

The disclosure of a complex, black-box military operation, tucked under the bulk of Cheyenne Mountain and regularly risking life and limb, and the fate of the entire planet, for twenty-five years shocked an entire world. It's taken two years for a picture to begin to emerge of the men and women of Stargate Command, hardly helped along by the dueling and often acrimonious portrayals offered up by various former members and political enemies of the program itself or of any one of the four generals who have commanded it over the years. I ask Jackson if he'd ever been aware of any worry about how the general public would take the news, and he laughs.

"We talked about it all the time," he tells me. "It was one of the games we'd play when we were starting to get a little crazy about not being able to explain what was going on to anybody else in our lives: what would they say if they knew?

"Not that many of us had friends outside the program, really," he adds. "It wasn't a life that made it easy to keep in touch with people. You'd wake up at 0600 Monday morning, spend three days on a planet where a day was thirty-one hours long, come back at 0100 Thursday morning, sleep for two hours before there was some kind of emergency, and then be up for another two days straight. It made it hard to maintain any sort of a social life."

Jackson's glib way of tossing off references to the kind of crisis that most people encounter once in a lifetime -- if ever -- speaks to the stresses of a life led on the perpetual front line. Indeed, the more I talk with him, the more I realize that in order to build an accurate mental picture of the events he was describing, I needed to triple or quadruple the stress, fear, and excitement. This modesty and humility is what led NPR correspondent Barry Wickler, last month, to accuse him of having had his adrenal glands surgically removed, an accusation he took with good humor at the time but seems perturbed by now.

"I'm not saying it wasn't stressful. It was. There were plenty of times when I wasn't sure that we were going to make it. But if you do anything long enough, it becomes part of your life, and you stop noticing that it's unusual. We used to make jokes about it -- you know, 'wake up, put on boots, save the world, get a cup of coffee, go home and find that your fridge had spontaneously generated a new species of mold', that kind of thing."

He shakes his head. "I remember one time when we got stranded unexpectedly on P67-19J --" The numbers and letters, official designations for the various planets accessable via Stargate, trip off his tongue like he's talking about the town one county over. "It wasn't a scheduled mission, and a few wires got crossed, so the guys whose job it was to go over and clean out your fridge and water your plants and feed your fish and the like didn't get us put on their list. It took us longer to clean up once we got home than it did for Sam to fix the Gate malfunction that stranded us there."

The life Jackson describes, a thousand tiny indignities such as layers of dust and spoiled milk and destroyed credit reports from missing scheduled bill payments -- his official records even indicate that he's been declared dead twice, a bureaucratic mistake that he says is still coming back to haunt him -- is a far cry from the glamor of life at Stargate Command as portrayed in various TV movies and miniseries in the two years since news broke. None of the veterans of Stargate Command who have been offered up by the Pentagon for interview ever mentioned the dead plants. But then again, no one throughout the entire secret war served as long, or as intensely, as the members of the flagship team Jackson helped anchor, known as SG-1. (Jackson also hints that he, no longer working for the Air Force, has chosen to disregard several elements of the briefings on what is and isn't acceptable to tell members of the press.)

"SG-1 always got the brunt of it, though," he does admit. "We got pulled in for the hopeless missions, most of the time. It was always a running joke. 'If it can't be done, send SG-1. They won't be able to do it either, but at least you'll have a nice little war on your hands to distract you from the problem.'"

THE JOKE IS funny, but it covers a reality that has been the subject of much criticism and vigorous debate. At the beginning of this year, the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University released a number of scathing dissections of the American government's actions in the galaxy at large over the past quarter-century, and several of the world's governments have banded together to demand full disclosure of more information than has been provided over the past two years, along with immediate access to all of the civilizations the Stargate Program has contacted over the years, citing the argument that the United States should not be permitted sole access to carry out what many critics still call "cowboy diplomacy".

"Finding out that the United States had been making agreements as though they were the government of the entire world was a bit of a shock," explained United Nations Secretary-General Ciaran Kelly, to me in email. "Finding out that the leaders of eleven different member states had entered into a conspiracy to fund and encourage that dominance, in exchange for technology and scientific advancements that weren't available elsewhere, was even worse. It will be years before we know precisely what that will do to the field of international relations."

The International Oversight Advisory, or IOA as it's familiarly known, has been publicly unapologetic about its decision to empower the United States as de-facto face of Earth among the stars. "The Americans had a significant head start," Shen Xiaoyi, the long-term IOA representative from China, told me, also in email. "We felt we would get farther if we worked with them, rather than against them."

That decision will, no doubt, be scrutinized further as time and distance from the immediate tumult provides a more accurate lens for historians to analyze the events surrounding the Stargate program, as will the complex and uneasy relationship between Stargate Command, the IOA, and the American government -- often personified in Richard Woolsey, who has served as the IOA's chief civilian oversight to the program since 2004.

Before I set out for this interview, I contacted Woolsey to ask what he thought of the Stanford Institute's publication. Woolsey declined to comment. It surprised me, as he's hardly proven unwilling to critique some of the more militant decisions made by Stargate Command, both on record at the time and publicly since the program's disclosure.

Jackson, however, seems to understand. "There's a real feeling you get, very quickly," he explains, leaning forward with his characteristic intensity. "It's like -- if you weren't there, if you haven't ever been standing in the middle of two warring Bronze Age cultures, both of whom were trying very hard to kill you because you were threatening their gods, and had to make a decision in five minutes or less that you knew was going to change the face of an entire world -- if you've never done that, well, the people who have done it are going to tell you to sit down and shut up until you know what you're talking about. Woolsey was with the Program long enough to have absorbed that feeling."

And him? He tries to avoid answering the question for a few minutes, but finally I get a little smile out of him. "It took me a long time to figure out that I probably shouldn't call politicians idiots to their faces," he admits. "I think I was being used as a threat in certain circles of Washington for a while. 'Cooperate with us, or we'll give Dr. Jackson your phone number and tell him this was your fault.' I made a lot of enemies in those first few years."

ONE ENEMY JACKSON never admits to making was the leader of SG-1, General (then Colonel) Jack O'Neill, despite conflicting reports. There are those who say that the men were close friends, and those who say they were often found in the middle of an argument, often over the mandate of the Stargate program and the conflict between military and scientific priorities. The reality, Jackson says, is both.

"Jack and I fought like cats and dogs," Jackson admits easily. "But yes, we were friends. He was the best friend I ever had, and certainly one of the best men I've ever known. We didn't have to agree with each other to respect each other. I won't pretend it was always easy, but even during the days when the only reason we saw eye to eye was because we were toe to toe and fighting, we always cared about each other."

I lean forward, ready to ask him to elaborate, but Nielson -- who's been in and out of the kitchen all morning, though he mostly stayed silent during the times I was conducting interviews -- chooses that moment to offer an uncharacteristic interruption, soliciting Jackson's opinion on some software he was apparently working on in the office downstairs. (Upon his retirement from the Air Force, Jackson accepted a job with his wife's company, providing translation support.) Jackson seems slightly jumpy while providing that opinion, and when matters have been settled, he rises to refill his mug -- he is well-known for drinking several pots of coffee a day -- and offer to refresh mine.

"We were close," he says, over his shoulder, as he fishes around in the cookie jar. "We were all close. But you had to be there. There's no way I can describe it. There's no way I can do justice to it. And out of the four of us, I'm the one we chose to tell the story, and I never feel I have the right words."

The curious phrasing went by me at the time, but it's obvious now in retrospect. Jackson views SG-1 -- a team formed in 1997, altered in 2004 when O'Neill accepted a promotion first to the command of the SGC and later to a shadow Cabinet appointment as head of the then-clandestine Department of Homeworld Security, and dissolved in 2005 upon the conclusion of what's come to be called the Second Anubis War -- as a living, breathing entity. He treats that entity as if it's still there and present in his life, despite O'Neill's death in a covered-up Pentagon skirmish in 2015, Jackson's own ten years spent in the Pegasus Galaxy on the City of Atlantis and General Samantha Carter's current appointment there, and Master Teal'c of Chulak's long years of political service on the Jaffa homeworld of Dakara.

To Jackson, SG-1 is not only alive and well, despite the fact that its unit designation was retired in 2006, but functions as an ideal against which he's measured himself since. "General Hammond used to call SG-1 'lightning in a bottle'," Jackson says. "There isn't any way to put that into words. We were a team. We were a family. I went through some of the most intense experiences of my life with them, and it changes you. I could walk onto Atlantis or Dakara tomorrow and it would be like nothing had ever changed between us."

IT'S A ROMANTICIZED picture of the unit that disgraced former Vice President Robert Kinsey -- presumed dead, not in a car accident as was released at the time, but in an alien spaceship high above Earth's atmosphere -- once called, in a 2003 memo to then-President Henry Hayes, "the most dangerous menace facing Earth." (Hayes also declined to contribute to this article.)

Jackson is unapologetically frank about the numerous accusations that his team set their own rules and answered to no one. "Answered to no one, no. Set our own rules, yes," he says. "I think we launched a mutiny -- twice? Three times? I've lost count. But if you knew that Earth was about to become a smoking radioactive crater and you were the only people who could stop it, and the people in charge told you that you couldn't go take care of it, wouldn't you?"

There's an undercurrent in Jackson's voice whenever the topic comes up, one that several commentators have picked up on. He's been accused of everything from megalomania to thrill-seeking to psychopathy, and the adjective most of his detractors -- and many of his allies -- apply to him is "arrogant". This is a man who vigorously defends a number of specific examples of his team unilaterally deciding the fate of billions, either without consultation with their superior officers or even against specific orders, by saying only that the actions they took were necessary at the time.

But the thirty-second soundbite -- or hour-long interview format -- does Jackson an injustice in occasionally portraying him as a stubborn idealist or a high-handed dictator. In person, Jackson is a thoughtful, measured man whose arrogance is carefully balanced with a self-awareness that doesn't seek to apologize for or explain away his flaws, only contextualize them. "History has always been written down by the people who win the wars," he says, his choice of phrasing perhaps more than a little telling about how he views his decades-long love-hate relationship with the Stargate Program and those who make its decisions. "In a hundred years, they'll either have canonized us or burned us in effigy. All I can do is make sure that our side of it gets written down, too."

Speaking of writing things down, rumors have been flying fast and furious for quite some time that Jackson is planning to write an unauthorized memoir of the first decade of Stargate Command to set the record straight. "Oh, God," he groans, when I ask him whether there's any truth behind the rumor. "You know, people keep asking me that. And I tell everyone the exact same thing: if I do, and I'm not saying one word about whether or not I have already, I'm not going to let anyone publish it until after I'm dead."

"Don't you worry," Mitchell-Jackson tells me. "I'm working on him."

THE MEDAL OF Honor is awarded to members of the United States armed forces for "...[distinguishing] himself or herself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States." Mitchell-Jackson, who was awarded the honor in recognition of her role in what is now being called the Battle of Antarctica in 2004, confesses to keeping hers in her lingerie drawer, although the flag accompanying the decoration hangs behind glass in a hallway in their home.

(Jackson, ineligible for military honors, must be reminded of his Congressional Medal of Honor and Congressional Gold Medal decorations; after struggling with his memory for a few minutes, he has to ask Mitchell-Jackson if she knows where the awards are. She tells him that they had been claimed for safekeeping by the late General O'Neill during one of the instances when, presumed dead, Jackson's belongings were packed up and sent to storage. Since O'Neill's death, they are now, apparently, in the garage.)

What may seem on the surface like a flip and cavalier attitude towards such honors, however, is nothing but; the respect in Mitchell-Jackson's voice when she speaks of it is plain. "It's a heavy weight," she says. "It always has been. My name is on the books with men and women stretching back years and years who are genuine American heroes. I can never really get over the thought that I don't deserve to stand there among them."

It's no false modesty, which is my immediate thought; Cameron Mitchell-Jackson, like her husband, is genuinely uncomfortable with the notion that she could be praised so highly for doing what she describes, even now, as "the job they paid me to do". Only their mutual insistence that the other -- and many other men and women of Stargate Command -- qualifies for the title of 'hero' saves me from having to wonder if some alien mind control drug straight out of science fiction had managed to brainwash the pair.

No, Mitchell-Jackson's humility is genuine. Her family, she explains, has a tradition of military service stretching back generations, and she seems uncomfortable with the merest suggestion that her actions were anything out of the ordinary. Lead pilot of the unit informally known as the "Snakeskinners" -- a never-explained reference to the Goa'uld, the mysterious alien race the SGC battled for a decade, about whom even now few details are known -- Mitchell-Jackson commanded Earth's fighter wing of F-302s, the first-generation near-space fighter-interceptor planes derived from Goa'uld technology. "If anyone deserves the title of hero," she says, pain still clear in her voice even fifteen years later, "it's the rest of my kids. I got out of it alive. They didn't."

Details on the Battle of Antarctica are sketchy, but both Jackson and Mitchell-Jackson are candid about the stakes involved. "I think I mentioned the 'smoking radioactive crater' thing earlier," Jackson says, his attitude flippant. "That would be what I was thinking of, yes. At least one of the instances."

"I'll tell you," Mitchell-Jackson adds, after a minute, "it took some tapdancing to explain how I'd qualified for the Medal of Honor by crashing my plane in a 'training exercise'. I was always lucky that my family could smell a cover story when they heard it, and knew enough not to ask."

Indeed, in the past two years since the declassification of the Stargate Program, a number of previously "missing" explanations for decorations have been steadily filled in on the records. The SGC boasts, at last count, a collective total of over seven hundred Service Cross and Distinguished Service medals over the years, to say nothing of the Purple Heart and Silver Star award counts, making it one of the most highly-decorated commands in the history of the United States armed forces.

Many of those awards -- well over sixty percent -- were awarded posthumously. "The fact that those stories can be told now -- that's the most important thing to come out of all of this," Jackson says. "There are a lot of husbands and wives, parents and children, who can finally get some closure." He pauses, then adds, in one of the muttered asides I was coming to realize he might not even be aware he was speaking out loud, "The secrecy really used to get to you."

I'D BEEN UNDER the impression that Jackson and Mitchell-Jackson met before the Battle of Antarctica -- they were, after all, both members of the Stargate Program -- but they're quick to correct me. "I never set foot under Cheyenne Mountain," Mitchell-Jackson says. "We didn't even really know what was going on. We'd heard some rumors here and there, but the actual day-to-day operation of the Gate teams, that was a total mystery."

And what about the fact that the other three members of SG-1 are publicly credited for their aid during the early days of Earth's spaceship construction program, while Jackson's name is mysteriously absent? Turns out the eventual couple missed meeting thanks to one of the adventures that seem to plauge Jackson's history. "That was one of those years everyone thought I was dead," Jackson says, wryly. "I think it was, oh, about the fifth time that particular mix-up happened."

The couple met for the first time when Jackson paid a bedside courtesy call to Mitchell-Jackson several months after the battle. ("I don't really count that, though," Mitchell-Jackson is quick to add, "seeing as how I was ninety percent unconscious at the time." Her rehabilitation after the crash took fourteen months.) It wasn't until ten years later -- immediately after, ironically enough, O'Neill's funeral, which Jackson returned from the Pegasus Galaxy to attend, and at which the couple met for the second time -- that they began spending time together.

"Love at first sight," Jackson declares immediately, as soon as the topic comes up. "Completely besotted. Head over heels."

Mitchell-Jackson elbows him sharply. "Don't lie to the nice woman," she says. "You followed us home because you were Gatelagged, galaxy-lagged, and completely incapable of remembering how to tie your own shoes."

"All lies," Jackson protests. "I was struck dumb by your beauty."

Typical of the banter between them, Mitchell-Jackson's words still do hold a grain of truth, like so many of the other jokes they made in my presence. Later on, I would find out -- from neither Mitchell-Jackson nor Nielson, whom I never did manage to corner alone, but from piecing together stories from multiple sources -- that Jackson had arrived back on Earth less than twenty-four hours before O'Neill's funeral for his first visit to Earth in ten years.

Jackson will speak about his extended stay on Atlantis, calling it a long-held dream of his -- "It was nice to get back to research for a while; I used to spend entire weeks buried in the archives, trying to make some sense out of them," he says -- but he's less forthcoming about his reasons for declining to return to Atlantis after O'Neill's funeral. Several sources have speculated that he and O'Neill had mutually agreed, prior to O'Neill's death, that one of them needed to remain on Earth to help influence the Stargate Program. Others suggest that perhaps Jackson, crushed by the death of one of his team even though he hadn't seen the man in a decade, suffered some form of nervous breakdown and was unable to return to active duty -- for even though he was technically listed as research staff on Atlantis, his front-line experience made him a natural candidate for emergency consults through the Gate. (Atlantis, like the SGC, operates several exploratory teams, for the purpose of research, first contact, and diplomacy.)

There are also those who ascribe a more romantic explanation to Jackson's sudden desire to transfer to desk duty beneath Cheyenne Mountain: true love.

THE DOCTORS JACKSON -- he holds four Ph.Ds, she 'just' the one -- married in Las Vegas in a private ceremony two and a half years ago, six months before the declassification of the Stargate Program. Since that declassification, Nielson-Mitchell Solutions -- the company founded by Mitchell-Jackson and Nielson in 2006, which was well-known in many military-industrial contracting circles as a software firm of excellent repute -- has not bid for or accepted any contracts. "I feel a little guilty about that," Jackson says. "They stopped taking contracts because they thought it wouldn't be fair to cash in on the publicity -- which wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad if I hadn't married Cammie and joined the company."

Both Mitchell-Jackson and Nielson protest this version of the truth. (Nielson, present for this section of our conversation -- he seemed to possess an uncanny knowledge of when the topic swung to the later years of Jackson's story for which he was a witness -- has lived with Mitchell-Jackson since the formation of the company; the downstairs of this lavish house contains, I am told, not only their office space, but an additional apartment.) "You had nothing to do with it," Nielson tells Jackson bluntly. "We were getting bored anyway."

In the interim, between offering interviews, both Jacksons attended virtual classes offered by the California Institute of Technology, where two months ago they were awarded matching doctorates in computer science -- an odd choice for Jackson, whose other degrees are in anthropology, archaeology, and philology, a branch of linguistics concentrating on classical language. Jackson shrugs off the observation. "The saying 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks' is blatantly untrue," he says. "The minute you stop learning new things, you stagnate. And stagnation is a quick way to find yourself dead."

Jackson's full of these little observations -- he sprinkles them left and right throughout our conversation -- but they somehow manage to avoid sounding like pithy little aphorisms. I get the distinct sense that I'm hearing the condensed wisdom of lessons learned throughout twenty years of survival on the front lines. Does he ever miss the excitement, now that he's taken early retirement?

"No, no, no," is his immediate response as soon as I pose the question. "Interestingly enough, it's actually not that much fun to get shot at. And besides, we have a lot of interesting problems we're working on. They'll keep me busy for a long time still."

What those 'interesting problems' might be, no one is saying. Speculation has been running rampant in the software world about what Nielson-Mitchell Solutions has been working on for the past several years. The addition of Jackson -- who had been consulting for them on a contract basis during the years when he and Mitchell-Jackson were dating and living together, and moved to a full-time position after retirement -- was seen by many in the tightly-knit, incestuous world of defense contracting as a sinecure position, Mitchell-Jackson's way of offering her husband some form of ongoing occupation. "Please," Nielson says, when I bring it up. "Nepotism only takes you so far. We're not that charitable. Really."

So, what are they up to that they need an archaeologist and linguist for? Before Jackson can explain again that he provides translation services -- he claims fluency in over thirty Earth languages alone, a staggering number -- Nielson interrupts. "Building a time machine in the secret underground bunker in the basement," he says. "We're bringing Daniel along so he can talk to all the nice people we go meet."

Neither Jackson nor Mitchell-Jackson dignifies this with a response -- or rather, a verbal response; Mitchell-Jackson punches him in the arm. (She doesn't appear to pull the punch, either.) "There are a lot of unfinished ideas Nielson and I never got a chance to follow up on," Mitchell-Jackson says. "We never had time to really explore a lot of things we always wanted to, because we were always too busy trying to complete these incredibly complex, multi-million-dollar projects with just the two of us. The time was right for us to set them all aside for a while and devote some time to research for a bit." Her smile, when she gives it, is sleek and somehow satisfied, and I have the distinct sense that I'm missing a good half of the conversation. "It's not like we need the money."

Indeed, Jackson -- whose net worth, based on public scrutiny of the newly-released budget figures for the past twenty-five years of Stargate Command and the presumption that he had little call to spend money while stationed in another galaxy, can be estimated as between two and three million dollars -- is definitely not the breadwinner of the family. Nielson-Mitchell Solutions is not a publicly-traded company, but painstaking work done by the government watchdog group Citizens' Alliance Against Government Over-Spending estimates that, in the fifteen years since Mitchell-Jackson and Nielson formed their partnership, they've been awarded military contracts totalling well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's not counting any private enterprise they may have engaged in. (For instance, sources tell me that both Mitchell-Jackson and Nielson have been erratic but enthusiastic participants in several high-stakes Las Vegas poker games, and regularly produce good showings in several major poker tournaments.)

"Well, you don't," Jackson says, thoughtfully. "But if you decide you're tired of me and demand a divorce, who else can I find to keep me in the style to which I've become so lavishly accustomed?"

Mitchell-Jackson responds to this hypothetical -- patently ridiculous to anyone who spends more than ten minutes in their presence, or can see the love in their eyes when they look at each other -- by stuffing a cookie into his mouth.

THE CONSTANT BANTER in this household is almost enough to lull you into a false sense of security. Sitting at their kitchen table with a plate full of Cameron Mitchell-Jackson's home-baked cookies, or curled up in front of the wood-burning stove in their living room festooned with hand-knit throws and comfortable artwork, it's easy to forget that you're in the presence of two people whose roles in shaping the first quarter of the twenty-first century will be hotly debated for years to come. This is helped along by Mitchell-Jackson's easy grace with people; Jackson says, fondly, that she's never met a stranger she hasn't tried to adopt. By the time our week together draws to a close, I realize that I've somehow promised to send her my grandmother's apple tart recipe -- a secret that hasn't left the family in sixty years.

There are moments, though, where an observer is reminded. Mitchell-Jackson pauses our conversations several times when Nielson, who appears to function as her errand-boy even as she functions as his cook and general minder, brings her a veritable cocktail of medication. Jackson seems to spook at quick motion in his peripheral vision, as if his subconscious is not yet convinced -- even five years after accepting a desk job -- that no one will leap out and start shooting at him. And both of them -- Jackson especially -- have to stop themselves, from time to time, from getting lost in their memories.

Buried in statistics released by the Pentagon is the bleak and chilling revelation that members of Stargate Command were over eight thousand times more likely to be injured or killed in the line of duty than a servicemember in any war zone or hot spot on Earth during a similar time span -- a figure that doesn't take into account the very real psychological toll such a life takes on the men and women who lead it. Emmett Bregman's documentary on the Stargate Program shows us some of the stresses those men and women suffered. The number of Stargate Command veterans -- the ones who were fortunate enough to beat the odds -- admitting to long-term psychological ramifications is high. Many suspect that the number who suffer long-term psychological ramifications, willing to admit it or not, is higher.

The Pentagon -- and its media liaisons -- are reluctant to discuss these matters. Indeed, the Pentagon has been strangely silent on the price its men and women have paid over the years. Much attention has been paid to the fact that the Goa'uld menace, something about which details are still sketchy, ended fairly decisively in 2005, thanks primarily to the actions of Jackson's former team SG-1. In all of the material we've seen so far, in all of the carefully-controlled slow presentations of disclosure, we have been assured that our galaxy was once a wild and dangerous place -- but we're safe now.

No one asks about the tactical situation on Atlantis, and if they do, they don't get an answer. Perhaps the Pentagon would like for us all to believe that what happens in another galaxy, stays in another galaxy. Judging by the failure of the world's governments to force true accountability and genuinely full disclosure, I fear that they may be succeeding.

I ask Jackson how many funerals he attended for his friends on Atlantis in the last year before he returned to Earth. He pauses. "Too many," he finally says. The only word I can use for his expression: haunted. "But even one is too many. Sometimes it feels like the only thing I did for twenty-five years was watch people die."

SINCE THE DAY that a stunned world turned on its television to find that a whole war had been fought and won without us ever knowing, we've been listening to academics, analysts, and pundits dissecting the information we've been given. Surely, one would think that we have enough of a picture assembled by now to evaluate the truth.

But for all that the story of Stargate Command has captured the national attention so completely -- as evidenced by how in-demand anyone who ever even came near Cheyenne Mountain has been on the interview circuit -- the story is curiously shallow. Much has been made of the early days of the program, with its science-fictional struggle of the scrappy human misfits against the forces of the evil galactic oppressors. The rhetoric is so beautiful, and the story speaks so deeply to our popular consciousness, that we've never stopped to wonder who the Galactic Overlords were -- or what motivated them.

It's obvious to anyone who examines the piles and piles of papers that the Pentagon has declassified that we aren't being told the entire story -- and not just about the Goa'uld. The epic narrative of Stargate Command ends with a bang on a planet named Dakara, halfway across the galaxy, with the supposed removal of the Goa'uld menace in 2005. What have the sixteen years since then contained, and why aren't we being told about them? Is it just that they don't make for good TV?

Like every reporter doing a story on Stargate Command, I was provided, prior to my interview, with a list of questions I was not permitted to ask and a list of topics I should steer away from. Jackson is notorious for volunteering unprompted answers to the questions that my colleagues and I aren't supposed to mention -- so much so, in fact, that some have speculated the reason he, a man who hates the spotlight, makes such a public figure of himself is to ensure that someone would notice if he were to mysteriously disappear.

But even Jackson, who grows visibly upset and indignant at the implication that he might be participating in some wider conspiracy of silence, shies away from discussing the Goa'uld in any level of detail -- even when I skirt up against the edges of what I'm not supposed to ask. "I never used to believe that there were some things people weren't meant to know," he says. "But that was a long time ago. There are a lot of things I wish I'd never seen."

"Trust me," Mitchell-Jackson adds, in an undertone. "This is one thing the boys upstairs got right."

What could be lurking in the as-yet-unreleased history to support such statements? What bogeyman remains powerful enough to cause such fear, even a generation later? We may never know; thus far, the American military has managed to block every legal action brought against them to attempt to force full disclosure. But one thing is certain: the people sitting across from me, who do know what the Pentagon is hiding, carry scars that may never heal. And even if they chafe at the restrictions placed upon them, they also seem, in some small fashion, to be relieved. Being forbidden to discuss the matter means that they don't have to.

As I'm wondering whether or not to press Jackson further, I notice that his hand is spread out over his thigh, fingernails digging into his jeans, and he has turned so that his back is fully against the wall he's sitting near. Mitchell-Jackson notices too; she reaches out, covers his hand with her own, and changes the subject.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, a young archaeologist who had been sidelined by the intellectual community for threatening the commonly-accepted picture of history was tapped by the United States Air Force to consult on a project that was going nowhere. Since then, he's been shot at, taken prisoner, stabbed, set on fire, presumed dead -- multiple times -- and been miraculously dragged back from the brink of death by alien technology at least once -- and those are just the things he's willing to talk about.

Since then, he's also found answers to some of the questions that have puzzled historians for centuries -- as well as finding vindication for his own theories. "I won't lie to you," Jackson says, flashing a quick grin, when I mention it. "I did enjoy that part. It was fun looking at everyone who called me a lunatic and thinking: if only you knew."

Well, now we know, and the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and history will never be the same again. The flood of papers -- many of them written by Jackson himself -- that have been declassified from the Stargate Program's civilian social-sciences department have caused consternation among some scholars, excitement among others. Buried in the wealth of data are answers to everything from who actually did build the Great Pyramid of Giza -- the particular question Jackson was exploring when the Stargate Program recruited him -- to what likely happened to the ten Lost Tribes of Israel -- or at least some of them. (Mitochondrial DNA testing indicates that at least some of them were forcibly re-settled on a planet visited by the Stargate Program's first-contact teams some ten years back.)

"Out there, people call us the Tau'ri," Jackson says, and the enthusiasm and passion in his voice is plain. "The word literally means 'first world'. To these people, we're legends. About as much as they are to us, really. Each population that was kidnapped by a Goa'uld invader and taken elsewhere to be enslaved has a different piece of the puzzle, and spending time trying to fit those puzzle pieces together to build the whole picture of what really happened was one of the greatest voyages of intellectual discovery I'll ever be privileged to participate in."

For someone who claims to love research and knowledge so much, though, Jackson's position on a front-line exploratory team is curious. SG-1 was an exploratory and diplomatic unit, not tasked with ground combat, but as Jackson says, "You could never really divide things up like that. The military/science divide evaporated pretty quickly. By the second or third year, any scientist who regularly traveled through the Gate was as experienced as any front-lines soldier. We all had to learn pretty quickly that the enemy didn't really care if you'd just found a fascinating discovery -- they'd shoot at you anyway."

Still, he was able to find time for research. As the long-term head of the SGC's Xenoarchaeology and Linguistics department, he supervised a staff of fifty scholars, each tasked with providing information on the cultures that each new population encountered had derived from. And instead of the tension between military and civilian that some might expect, many veterans of the SGC credit Jackson's team, or the information that they provided, with saving multiple lives.

"You never stop to think, when you're in Anthropology 101, that a working knowledge of the burial customs of the Carduchoi people might someday make the difference between life and death," Jackson says, laughing. "But all of those guys -- they learned really quickly that when someone from X/L said 'don't touch that rock', it was usually a pretty damn good idea not to touch the rock."

Jackson's work is credited as a reference or cited in nearly every paper produced by the SGC's scholars, including those produced during the ten years he was not formally the director of the department he helped to found. Indeed, the volume of scholarship represented in the papers he has written over the past twenty-five years, slowly being declassified now, leaves one wondering how he ever had time to explore the galaxy. Or eat. Or sleep.

"I always used to say 'I'll sleep when I'm dead'," Jackson says. "And then Jack would get grumpy at me. But -- you know! On the one hand, sleep. On the other hand, finally getting to decipher Linear A. Sleep usually lost."

Since the partial declassification of the Stargate Program, Jackson has received offers from hundreds of universities, public and private, to join their faculty and continue his research. He has, thus far, declined them all. "I won't say I've found answers to all of my questions," he says. "But they're different questions now, and they're the kind of questions whose answers won't be found just by consulting the historical record. At least, not the one we have available to us here. And that phase of my life is long over. I'll let other people have the fun of trying to figure out how to write new history books."

He pauses. "We never did manage to solve Proto-Elamite, though," he says, sounding wistful. "That one drove me nuts for years."

WHAT WE KNOW about the Stargate Program barely scratches the surface of what there is to know; that much is certain. And the public opinion is divided between those who desperately want to know more and those who are unhappy with how much has already been revealed. "Oh, I pretty much keep a file of interesting death threats," Jackson says, more cheerful than, perhaps, one might think to expect him to sound when talking about the possibility of violence committed against him. "Some people are pretty unhappy about what I have to say. JD and Cammie and I read the best ones out loud over dinner."

Is he frightened? "I know it's impossible to plan for every eventuality," he says. "But I've had people trying to kill me for the best part of the past quarter-century. After a while, you just don't even notice it anymore."

Just as constant as the death threats, of course, are the demands for information -- about his discoveries, about the history of Stargate Command, about his personal life. (Since our interview, I've been offered several million dollars for copies of my tapes. When I mentioned this to Mitchell-Jackson in a followup fact-check, she immediately offered to double any price I was offered. I declined both offers.) The day the Stargate Program went public, Jackson sacrified any hope of ever again leading a normal life. Does it bother him?

"By this point, I wouldn't even know what normal is," he says. He sounds, not upset or angry, but simply tired. "My life stopped being normal when I was around thirty years old. When you spend an entire year watching the sun rise over a desert thousands of light-years away, when you spend a decade walking the halls of the Lost City of Atlantis... Your idea of what's normal goes away pretty quickly. This is just a new phase of my life. I'll adapt to it. I always have before."

Indeed, Jackson's life has been a series of reinventions, even though much of it has been lived under the aegis of one of the most regimented organizations on the planet. Orphaned at the age of eight, raised by friends of the family, a triple Ph.D. by the age of twenty-five, recruited by the Air Force at the age of thirty; until that time, he moved every several years, never quite staying in one place long enough to put down roots. And his life since that point hasn't exactly been a picture of stability, either. He is reticent about his first marriage -- his wife, taken as a Goa'uld slave shortly after their first anniversary, was confirmed dead not long after -- and his year spent among her people, Earth's first extraterrestrial contact, saying only that the topic is still painful.

He'll say little more about the year he was thought dead after an overdose of radiation, but he does hasten to dispel rumors going around that he actually did die and was brought back to life afterwards. "Please," he says, looking faintly harassed at the mention. "If we had that technology, do you think they would have waited a year to use it? I was very sick, true, and one of our more advanced allies at the time came to take me away with her to heal me -- which she did, obviously, since I'm still here. It affected my memory pretty badly, though, and there was some kind of accident while I was on my way back -- I'm honestly still not sure what happened -- and I wound up on another planet without any memory of who I was or how I'd gotten there. If the SGC hadn't happened to be running a mission to that planet, I'd probably still be there."

Abydos and Vis Uban -- the two planets he names -- aren't the only places Jackson has spent extended amounts of time; neither is Atlantis. He rattles off a list of cultures he's studied with and places he's lived -- or been stranded -- without having to think about them. One thing is clear: he's a true citizen of the galaxy.

"But Colorado Springs is home now," he finally finishes. "In a way that it never really was before."

"He's scared of what I'll do to him if he tries to up and leave," Mitchell-Jackson adds. "I've got family everywhere who can hunt him down and drag him back to me."

SOLDIER, SCHOLAR, DIPLOMAT, explorer, ambassador, spy; Daniel Jackson has been them all, and in many ways, he still carries the pieces of each role he's ever played, woven into the tapestry of the man he is today.

"I still wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night sometimes," Jackson says, "thinking I'm hearing the SGC Gate alarm or Atlantis's all-hands warning siren. And there are some nights I wind up dreaming in Goa'uld." He looks at Mitchell-Jackson, fondly. "Cammie usually knows how bad the dream was by how loudly I'm shouting."

I ask him what he remembers most about his years with Stargate Command. He goes silent for a long minute, and his face is thoughtful. "The thing I remember most fondly is how close everyone was," he finally says. "Not just SG-1. Everyone underneath that mountain was a family, really. We were all living this crazy life, sure, but we were living it together. There was always someone who understood, always someone who was willing to take a few hours out of his or her day to give you a hand when the stress got so bad you thought you couldn't cope."

And the bad parts? "Watching people die. Watching people die and knowing you couldn't save them. Watching people die, and knowing it was your misunderstanding or mistranslation or just plain mistake that made it happen. Encountering all that misery, everywhere you turned across the galaxy, and knowing that you were fighting as hard as you could to make the situation better and it wasn't doing any damn good. Sometimes we made things better. Sometimes we made things worse. A lot of the time, it was worse."

He looks troubled. I let him talk. "We walked into cultures that had been untouched for centuries and uprooted everything -- their entire belief system, so many of their cultural traditions, everything. And we justified it to ourselves by saying that they were being exploited and abused by an enemy that didn't give a shit about their well-being. We tried -- I tried -- so hard over the years to make sure we kept our interference to a minimum, offered humanitarian aid everywhere we could, provided information and education and resources to people who were being kept starving, ignorant, and downtrodden in a slavery more profound than anything that humanity has ever managed to produce on this planet. We did a lot of good out there. We still do. I still do honestly believe that in the long term, we've been a positive force. But it's hard to be able to see, close up. It's a lot easier to see all the ways in which you're failing."

THE GALAXY IS certainly a different place for our actions, but Jackson, like many, admits that it's going to take a long time until history can be the final judge. "I think about everything we did out there, and wonder what it would have been like if we hadn't. We sacrificed so much, all of us, because we believed we were doing the right thing. We argued over it constantly. People try to judge us now, people bring up the ethical problems we were facing every damn day like they have simple, neat, easy solutions, and they don't. They never have. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that."

He returns, over and over again, to the difficulty he's had in coming to terms with his own actions and the effects they've had, on him and on others. I'm beginning to realize that in many ways, Jackson feels morally responsible for every action undertaken by the Stargate Program since its inception, whether he had direct input into the decision or not -- even now, once he's no longer involved in the Program at all.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, is famously reported to have quoted the Bhagavad-Gita, after the Trinity explosion that launched us into the nuclear age: "Now I am become Death, shatterer of worlds." Test director Kenneth Bainbridge put it more simply: "Now we're all sons of bitches." History is full of scientists who have made epic discoveries and then come to regret how those discoveries have been used. The Stargate is not inherently a weapon of war, but Jackson's actions in discovering its mechanisms enabled us to fight one. Jackson vacillates back and forth between regret and elation.

"We saved a lot of people. We caused a lot of people to die, too. There were so many casualties. Us, our allies, our enemies ... Whole cultures, really. The whole face of the galaxy changed practically overnight when we got out there. If I hadn't made the breakthrough that allowed us to work the Stargate, if I hadn't made decision after decision over the years that didn't work out or only made things worse..."

Jackson falls silent. As the silence grows larger, I prompt him with what is probably, in retrospect, an inane question: does he think all of the sacrifice and struggle was worth it?

He reaches out without having to look and takes his wife's hand in his. His answer, simple and plain enough that it could bring tears to your eyes, is, "It always has been."

Suzanne Kourena is a Rolling Stone correspondent. Portions of this article, edited for space, appear as the cover story of the May edition of the Rolling Stone print magazine.

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