The Iraqi Stargate

Here's a weird theory that's been floating around the Internet for about fifteen years now. Apparently, the gods of the ancient Sumerians were space aliens and they provided their worshippers with stargates. You know, those big round gizmos from the 1994 film and the television franchise that ran in three incarnations from 1997 to 2010. One of these stargates was discovered by Saddam Hussein when he ordered renovations to an ancient Sumerian palace, and the United States invaded to take control of the device in 2003.

Essentially, the Iraq War Stargate theory pushes and narrows this idea a little further. Saying one of the technologies that were gifted upon the Sumerians were stargates and their positioning was one of the major reasons for the years of strife in the Middle East. I reached out to Dr. Michael Salla, who wrote an in-depth article about the theory way back in 2003, to learn about it further.

Before we got into the nitty-gritty, I had to figure out if a stargate was just as cool as Hollywood made it out to be. "It's kind of like an instantaneous space-time means of travel where people are instantaneously teleported from one area to another," said Salla. Yup, super cool.

So, the stargate is apparently found near in the Nasiriyah, a city about 370 km south-east of Baghdad—in the ancient city of Ur—within that city is the great Ziggurat, a massive temple, which had a, you guessed it, stargate. Some theories also argue there is a stargate directly in the city of Baghdad, in one of the basements of Hussein's palaces— where he probably did some pretty freaky stuff with it.

While the locations and number of the stargates is in dispute, one thing the theorists do all agree on, is that the Iraq War wasn't the first time that a foreign power showed interest in it. In what sounds like a super sweet Indiana Jones fan-fic, the Nazis were fighting the British in during WWII over control of the Stargate.


Fast forward several decades and, according to some theorists,1980s Saddam started doing restoration to the temple worrying the world (read: the Illuminati). Oddly the theories don't really mention the first Iraq War but, after years of work, Hussein either was able to get the stargate working or learned something important from it and big-daddy America got concerned.

"The Bush administration recognized that Hussein had some very, very valuable relevant information concerning the ancient history of the planet," said Salla. "Either technology or texts basically confirming this and he was going to release this to the general public. I think that was a big part of the reason why the Bush Administration went into Iraq, to stop Hussein from revealing this information and to also get control control themselves."

There's no mention of the role that the stargate played in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm. But that's really not surprising. Stargate most likely took about two years to film and was released in 1994, so Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich were probably still working on the screenplay in 1991. No movie, no conspiracy theory. Those are the rules, right? How could George Bush the First know to invade the country without its incredible discovery committed to film?

On a serious note, conspiracy theorists believe what they do because they want the world to be a sensible place run by rational if nefarious individuals. Writing off the Iraq war as the massive monument to bad intelligence and human stupidity that it was just doesn't work for these people. Iraq had no weapons that threatened the United States in any way, and no connection to the 9/11 attacks. But there must have been a good reason!

Actually, given that a bunch of people believe that the United States invaded another country in order to get its hands on movie technology, I think it's safe to assume that stupidity is among the most powerful forces in the universe. This conspiracy theory makes about as much sense as invading Tunisia and Morocco (where the Tatooine scenes in Star Wars were filmed) in order to get our hands on the Mos Eisley spaceport, that fucked-up bar, and the Millenium Falcon.

That would be cool, right? With the Millenium Falcon We could make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs! Let's just ignore that a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. Shall we? After all, stupidity is mighty!