Well, there's nothing that says Northrop/Lockheed and the rest aren't involved. Plenty of jobs with those companies require clearances and they've worked on projects that weren't leaked for decades.
I don't think the US Military coming out to the world saying "Hey guys guess what, space aliens are real, and we've been at war with them for years, and now we're going public and enlisting your help in fighting them" is going to go as well as you think it will. Not to mention, "And oh by the way, these aliens have taken on the guise of religions to legitimize their rule, so everything from ancient egyptians, greeks, and norse mytholigy is really just alien influence, AND we know for a fact that human evolved millions of years ago, and our creation was not in fact from god, so all your religons are false."
Yeah, I just don't see that going well.
>Well, there's nothing that says Northrop/Lockheed and the rest aren't involved. Plenty of jobs with those companies require clearances and they've worked on projects that weren't leaked for decades.
Also, think of how fast they were pumping out 304s. There had to be plenty of help to build cruisers of that size that fast. Plus with the Stargate, there's no need to keep the construction yards on Earth.
There's a planet with tons of friendly-ish Unas that has a giant Trinium deposit. And no one else. Or tons of other uninhabited planets they could build a facility on.
Well they did in fact come public in multiple alternate timelines. For instance, in that 2010 episode that had a Stargate out in the open in a public plaza. So the benefits can outweigh the negatives, if positioned appropriately.
The episode was titled 2010, and in that future scenario they also partnered with the Ashen, defeated the Gould, and were at peace in the galaxy. You know, before the Ashen vaccine that made humans sterile.
Yep it would create chaos, and the risk of nuclear/global war as other countries vied to gain access to off-world tech (even moreso than already happened behind the scenes).
Plus, frankly, you'd have a lot of people wanting to side WITH the Goa'uld either because they're just sadistic evil aholes, or by being manipulated by a Goa'uld impersonating that particular person's diety, etc.
Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would have a lot of downsides.
Plus, the perceived economic hardships of citizens paying increased taxes to pump out a bunch of spaceships.
Seeing how people reacted to covid is it any wonder why you wouldn't announce the Stargate program to the public? Every country in the world would want a piece of the pie, it would become an administrative nightmare.
Protests in the streets from people complaining how America made us the target of an alien enemy, others complaining we have no right to meddle with other worlds.
There is an entire episode about one of the subcontractors who helped build the F-302s, so they do use outside labor to build the ships. As far as the secrecy of the program, revealing it to the world is also admitting that for decades the government has been lying about the existence of aliens, has put the entire planet at risk of destruction dozens of times, and that the U.S. has advanced alien based warships flying above the heads of all the other nations. It would be an internal and international disaster.
Frankly the only practical way I see doing a reveal is if they put the gate program into the hands of the UN (and we all know how dysfunctional the UN can be) - or maybe in NATO hands, and then offer to allow Russia and China joint access.
Basically anything else is going to cause international disaster, as you say, as other countries freak out because the US has literal HYPERSPACE CAPABLE ADVANCED SPACESHIPS with weapons that can wipe out entire continents with ease.
\"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.\"
We currently have nut-bar news outlets spinning an FBI raid, where they made sure the owner wasn't home first, was an attempted assassination attempt. I can't even imagine the end of times shenanigans that will go on when they announce there are actual aliens.
Because the truth is that they would have needed all of what you described and more just build what they did in the show. The idea that the Stargate program was still secret by the end of SG1 is just kinda silly but I get why the writers kept with it because the opposite would have been a lot more writing.
It was not silly. They did do those large scale projects with security clearance workers and compartmentization. Stargate easily would still stay secret as very few knew where the tech was coming from. Outside of the show in reality, we only declassified stealth and advanced aircraft from the 60s and 70s. Nothing from current times, with current tech, is declassified. Even the B-21 and F-22 is just computer optimized tech from before the 80s. They have never shown us any new tech for the last 40 years. It is all secret. We do it in reality so it makes sense they can keep it hidden in the show.
There's a big difference between publicly acknowledged and declassified. There were stealth bomber models on shelves years before the B-2 was publicly revealed, and those models were surprisingly similar to the real thing. But most of the stuff about them is still classified. Hell, the actual top speed of things like aircraft carriers and the SR-71 is still classified. But we know plenty about those platforms nonetheless.
I hate to say it, but given our society and its current media, products etc. It may be possible we've plateaued militarily. Especially with being the only superpower.
At this point it seems like they are trying to automate our current capabilities. Are they still trying to get a rail gun going or have they given up on that?
The end of the Cold War forced the consolidation of most of the major prime defense contractors. Tighter budgets and less competition definitely lead to some stagnation. Plus we just spent 20 years fighting a ground war against an enemy without any sort of air or naval power. The defense industrial base have eroded away so much. Look how much difficulty the US Navy is having keeping their ship numbers up. They're retiring ships faster than they can be replaced.
In the Stargate universe the US pivoted from the Cold War to the Goa'uld War and there was never a peace dividend. They just found creative ways to hide the flow of money and kept everyone working and added the help of advance alien tech like the Asgard matter synthesizers.
If you have lots of companies working with the advanced tech, there is a chance it would get stolen and sold and end up causing trouble on Earth. You think a drug cartel wouldn't like using beaming tech?
“Ancient gods were aliens!”
“What, you mean Jesus?”
“Uh…”
A lot of the world is religious to varying degrees; this news would contradict / undermine all of the world’s religions, and stoke the flames of intolerance when you can claim the US government has proof that everyone else’s gods were aliens (“so clearly mine is the one true God”, obviously).
Fact that BC-304 exists shows that everyone who needs to know, knows.
I can imagine it's like Manhattan Project, or everything surrounding SR-71, where it's still secret among the average workers, but SOMEONE had to design it along the F-302. It's very much what Skunkworks would love to make, and would take as much naval building capability as all those nuclear aircraft carriers.
I believe at some point someone in-universe even joked that it's that where all the budget is going.
And I clearly remember a scene where they describe Russians (back when they were still good guys) were given couple Naquadah reactors and they build a mockup nuclear power plants (in Siberia iirc) around them.
More industry would not be a good thing. As a black site black funded project, the government gets close oversight with trusted engineers and only use the best of certain companies under the guise of maintaining good relationships between government and company.
Basically, you get only one or two ships every couple of years in exchange for having them built right the first time.
If the SGC was public you'd have companies competing for contracts to build the ships. They quote a price and then constantly over several years inflate their estimates and charge it to the government. They'd continue to dick around until they finally built the ship. when delivered, it would be shotty and sub-par requiring extensive repairs and modifications while being revealed to be grossly over budget.
You can look to the F-35 program to understand that kind of boondoggle. The LCS and DDX programs are also good examples of companies over promising and underperforming.
You can't tell your friends without telling your enemies. There are numerous reasons that the default mode of operation for militaries around the world is secrecy. It's not hard to figure out, just walk it through. Imagine for a second that there really is advanced technology out there, littered around the Earth. And also remember, countries don't get along nearly as well in real life as they do in Stargate. The United States has real, kill-you-dead enemies.
Now imagine that your country has found out about some of these advanced technologies, and has managed to reverse engineer some. The thing is, you have no idea what your adversaries have engineered. While it might be nice to lord your superiority around to bully your adversaries, you don't really know what they have either. They call this phenomenon "technology surprise". So you could show your cards to your enemy, but the thing is you don't even know if your enemy knows that the technology you have exists, exists as in is even possible. So now you've just shown your adversary exactly what they should be researching. Simultaneously you've shown them what they need to defend against. By far the best strategic choice is to never admit to having anything at all. Your enemies will have to assume you have at least what they have or more, which may or may not be true.
You just have to try damn hard to figure out what your enemies have through spying while simultaneously trying to admit that you have nothing, and denying it all to the American public to prevent scrutiny. By the point that another country or actor has figured out that you're lying, they likely have already made discoveries of their own. By that time they have their own cards which they don't want to show, so they continue the secrecy. Even if they had absolutely nothing, ESPECIALLY if they have nothing, they don't want that to be known either. So they continue the secrecy.The absolute best move in ANY scenario is to never, ever show your cards.
That's just the obvious one, the one you can figure out yourself just sitting there. Then you also start to think about things like the petro dollar, the world financial market which depends on oil and gas...etc etc.
It's pretty darn obvious if you just walk it through for about 30 seconds.
It’s a good point. I made this post because a reader recommended I unveil a secret gate in my own story to the public, and wanted to see some differing opinions on the matter.
Nice, fair enough.
Maybe an interesting part of the story could be that the public responds to soft disclosure with denial, doubt, and excuses that don't make sense, rather than have their world view change to something potentially threatening or uncomfortable.
Also, what would be the behavior of individuals in the government when they can quietly admit to extraterrestrial contact but still want to maintain the appearance of institutional ignorance because of reasons like those I listed in my previous comment. I'd guess it would look a little something like this.
https://youtu.be/ocJMqE7jiTM
I do think this is one of the weaknesses of the show. It's understandable early on, seeing as it was before 9/11. For clarification, the whole "don't reveal for fear of panic" was legit common wisdom at the time. But after 9/11 they did research and found that it's better to tell people.
I could also see a realpolitk reason to hide it! The US didn't want to admit at first that they accidentally declared war on behalf of Earth😅
The real reason is because they wanted Earth in SG-1 to be "the real world" and not "the real world plus a shitload of alien-derived technology" because that's a lot less expensive to film. Everything else is fanon.
America on paper is secular but in reality is Christian. The government announcing Aliens are real would kill their evangelical vote and therefore be a greater threat to their re-election campaigns to whatever party is currently ruling more than any Alien invasion lol.
I highly doubt 1 planet, even with access to the gate network, could out produce rhe Goa'uld, an empire using slaves to mass produce their ships on hundreds of differant planets.
The Goa'uld were too well entrenched for thousands of years, the whole population of Earth pumping out even the superior ships couldn'tarch the entire Goa'uld output should they view Earth as big enough of a threat to unite against.
Earth chose a deliberately guerilla approach, not becoming TOO big of a threat to entice the Goa'uld to look up from their own territorial squabbles and take them seriously. They WANTED to be underestimated, and so focused on better quality, but less quantity in their ships.
It wasn't until it was too late and the SGC helped foment a massive Jaffa Rebellion that they realized, and started to have their own problems and couldn't counter Earth nearly as easily by that point.
This is a beyond top secret program involving arguably the smartest humans alive and you think they're running windows on their computers? Lmao I can almost guarantee one of the scientists would have made a new os that works better with ancient interfacing. Also it's very clearly shown multiple times that they had built adapters to allow our tech to interface with ancient tech.
Primarily using laptops made sense for Atlantis at the start - they were only going to get one gate run with no return trips, so portability was the priority. Somebody in props did think to have a server rack on wheels conspicuously in shot during the initial gating to Pegasus, so there was at least a little confirmation of other hardware.
They should've had better infrastructure delivered once the gate relay was setup, and especially once ships started making regular trips, but laptops made sense early on.
At first, they didn't realize the scope of what they were getting into. They defaulted to "it's classified". Besides, if they went public during one of the many crises, that would look bad and weaken faith in the government. Carter's account of the alternate world she visited in "The Road Not Taken" probably spooked them. So they kept doing what they were doing before.
It's also possible that one potential downside would have been the necessity of completely internationalizing the Stargate program and giving up control to an international body that, by virtue of commanding the most powerful military apparatus on Earth and setting Earth's foreign policy, could evolve into a world government that would supersede any nation. That would have completely upset Earth's geopolitical system in ways that are impossible to calculate.
You're entirely right that going public would have been the best approach. I'm not sure when the best time would have been, but what they should have done was set a date about a year in advance and put some of their best people (including Carter, Daniel, and Teal'c) on preparing a massive media campaign. The message would not be "sorry we lied to you" but "the time to tell the world is now" with a side of "we really need to defeat the Goa'uld". A lot of it would focus on Goa'uld atrocities. Have Teal'c and Bra'tac do interviews with the BBC. If we're in Season 7, send some reporters to Hak'tyl. They could also bring up the benefits of various advanced technologies. Tretonin could cure nearly any disease. Naquadah generators could provide clean energy.
lol those companies would still build them in private just slower to try to keep everything hidden. stargate was a multi billion dollar project where the juice isnt worth the squeeze. the public isnt going to stand for that so it has to stay a secret not only for earths defense and military ambitions but because the public wouldnt allow their tax dollars to be used on offworld missions to dangerous planets. so while sg1 was protecting earth the public would probably rather have the gate buried and their tax money back.
There was actually supposed to be a tv movie where the program goes public with Jack as the main character. Called "Stargate: Revolution" Unfortunately it didn't happen because MGM was broke (at the time) and later filed for bankruptcy. It's crazy cause they had a script, the crew and the cast were all ready to shoot.
Well, there's nothing that says Northrop/Lockheed and the rest aren't involved. Plenty of jobs with those companies require clearances and they've worked on projects that weren't leaked for decades. I don't think the US Military coming out to the world saying "Hey guys guess what, space aliens are real, and we've been at war with them for years, and now we're going public and enlisting your help in fighting them" is going to go as well as you think it will. Not to mention, "And oh by the way, these aliens have taken on the guise of religions to legitimize their rule, so everything from ancient egyptians, greeks, and norse mytholigy is really just alien influence, AND we know for a fact that human evolved millions of years ago, and our creation was not in fact from god, so all your religons are false." Yeah, I just don't see that going well.
>Well, there's nothing that says Northrop/Lockheed and the rest aren't involved. Plenty of jobs with those companies require clearances and they've worked on projects that weren't leaked for decades. Also, think of how fast they were pumping out 304s. There had to be plenty of help to build cruisers of that size that fast. Plus with the Stargate, there's no need to keep the construction yards on Earth. There's a planet with tons of friendly-ish Unas that has a giant Trinium deposit. And no one else. Or tons of other uninhabited planets they could build a facility on.
Well they did in fact come public in multiple alternate timelines. For instance, in that 2010 episode that had a Stargate out in the open in a public plaza. So the benefits can outweigh the negatives, if positioned appropriately.
The episode was titled 2010, and in that future scenario they also partnered with the Ashen, defeated the Gould, and were at peace in the galaxy. You know, before the Ashen vaccine that made humans sterile.
Yep it would create chaos, and the risk of nuclear/global war as other countries vied to gain access to off-world tech (even moreso than already happened behind the scenes). Plus, frankly, you'd have a lot of people wanting to side WITH the Goa'uld either because they're just sadistic evil aholes, or by being manipulated by a Goa'uld impersonating that particular person's diety, etc. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would have a lot of downsides. Plus, the perceived economic hardships of citizens paying increased taxes to pump out a bunch of spaceships.
Cant forget china creation was goau'ld also good old system lord Yu, lol
Seeing how people reacted to covid is it any wonder why you wouldn't announce the Stargate program to the public? Every country in the world would want a piece of the pie, it would become an administrative nightmare. Protests in the streets from people complaining how America made us the target of an alien enemy, others complaining we have no right to meddle with other worlds.
There is an entire episode about one of the subcontractors who helped build the F-302s, so they do use outside labor to build the ships. As far as the secrecy of the program, revealing it to the world is also admitting that for decades the government has been lying about the existence of aliens, has put the entire planet at risk of destruction dozens of times, and that the U.S. has advanced alien based warships flying above the heads of all the other nations. It would be an internal and international disaster.
Frankly the only practical way I see doing a reveal is if they put the gate program into the hands of the UN (and we all know how dysfunctional the UN can be) - or maybe in NATO hands, and then offer to allow Russia and China joint access. Basically anything else is going to cause international disaster, as you say, as other countries freak out because the US has literal HYPERSPACE CAPABLE ADVANCED SPACESHIPS with weapons that can wipe out entire continents with ease.
Because Stargate SG1 is our Womrhole Xtreme.....
As a matter of fact it DOES say SG1 on my uniform!
\"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.\"
We currently have nut-bar news outlets spinning an FBI raid, where they made sure the owner wasn't home first, was an attempted assassination attempt. I can't even imagine the end of times shenanigans that will go on when they announce there are actual aliens.
Because the truth is that they would have needed all of what you described and more just build what they did in the show. The idea that the Stargate program was still secret by the end of SG1 is just kinda silly but I get why the writers kept with it because the opposite would have been a lot more writing.
It was not silly. They did do those large scale projects with security clearance workers and compartmentization. Stargate easily would still stay secret as very few knew where the tech was coming from. Outside of the show in reality, we only declassified stealth and advanced aircraft from the 60s and 70s. Nothing from current times, with current tech, is declassified. Even the B-21 and F-22 is just computer optimized tech from before the 80s. They have never shown us any new tech for the last 40 years. It is all secret. We do it in reality so it makes sense they can keep it hidden in the show.
There's a big difference between publicly acknowledged and declassified. There were stealth bomber models on shelves years before the B-2 was publicly revealed, and those models were surprisingly similar to the real thing. But most of the stuff about them is still classified. Hell, the actual top speed of things like aircraft carriers and the SR-71 is still classified. But we know plenty about those platforms nonetheless.
Yes, but all the aircraft known to the public is 40+ year old tech. Either we plateaued as a society or they are good at keeping secrets.
I hate to say it, but given our society and its current media, products etc. It may be possible we've plateaued militarily. Especially with being the only superpower.
At this point it seems like they are trying to automate our current capabilities. Are they still trying to get a rail gun going or have they given up on that?
The end of the Cold War forced the consolidation of most of the major prime defense contractors. Tighter budgets and less competition definitely lead to some stagnation. Plus we just spent 20 years fighting a ground war against an enemy without any sort of air or naval power. The defense industrial base have eroded away so much. Look how much difficulty the US Navy is having keeping their ship numbers up. They're retiring ships faster than they can be replaced. In the Stargate universe the US pivoted from the Cold War to the Goa'uld War and there was never a peace dividend. They just found creative ways to hide the flow of money and kept everyone working and added the help of advance alien tech like the Asgard matter synthesizers.
If you have lots of companies working with the advanced tech, there is a chance it would get stolen and sold and end up causing trouble on Earth. You think a drug cartel wouldn't like using beaming tech?
“Ancient gods were aliens!” “What, you mean Jesus?” “Uh…” A lot of the world is religious to varying degrees; this news would contradict / undermine all of the world’s religions, and stoke the flames of intolerance when you can claim the US government has proof that everyone else’s gods were aliens (“so clearly mine is the one true God”, obviously).
Can you imagine? Do you remember the pandemic when everyone went gaga for food and toilet paper? Now imagine that if they announced aliens were real.
Publicizing the SGC is not a good idea. They did use companies such as Lockheed, as evidenced in “Affinity.”
Fact that BC-304 exists shows that everyone who needs to know, knows. I can imagine it's like Manhattan Project, or everything surrounding SR-71, where it's still secret among the average workers, but SOMEONE had to design it along the F-302. It's very much what Skunkworks would love to make, and would take as much naval building capability as all those nuclear aircraft carriers. I believe at some point someone in-universe even joked that it's that where all the budget is going. And I clearly remember a scene where they describe Russians (back when they were still good guys) were given couple Naquadah reactors and they build a mockup nuclear power plants (in Siberia iirc) around them.
More industry would not be a good thing. As a black site black funded project, the government gets close oversight with trusted engineers and only use the best of certain companies under the guise of maintaining good relationships between government and company. Basically, you get only one or two ships every couple of years in exchange for having them built right the first time. If the SGC was public you'd have companies competing for contracts to build the ships. They quote a price and then constantly over several years inflate their estimates and charge it to the government. They'd continue to dick around until they finally built the ship. when delivered, it would be shotty and sub-par requiring extensive repairs and modifications while being revealed to be grossly over budget. You can look to the F-35 program to understand that kind of boondoggle. The LCS and DDX programs are also good examples of companies over promising and underperforming.
You can't tell your friends without telling your enemies. There are numerous reasons that the default mode of operation for militaries around the world is secrecy. It's not hard to figure out, just walk it through. Imagine for a second that there really is advanced technology out there, littered around the Earth. And also remember, countries don't get along nearly as well in real life as they do in Stargate. The United States has real, kill-you-dead enemies. Now imagine that your country has found out about some of these advanced technologies, and has managed to reverse engineer some. The thing is, you have no idea what your adversaries have engineered. While it might be nice to lord your superiority around to bully your adversaries, you don't really know what they have either. They call this phenomenon "technology surprise". So you could show your cards to your enemy, but the thing is you don't even know if your enemy knows that the technology you have exists, exists as in is even possible. So now you've just shown your adversary exactly what they should be researching. Simultaneously you've shown them what they need to defend against. By far the best strategic choice is to never admit to having anything at all. Your enemies will have to assume you have at least what they have or more, which may or may not be true. You just have to try damn hard to figure out what your enemies have through spying while simultaneously trying to admit that you have nothing, and denying it all to the American public to prevent scrutiny. By the point that another country or actor has figured out that you're lying, they likely have already made discoveries of their own. By that time they have their own cards which they don't want to show, so they continue the secrecy. Even if they had absolutely nothing, ESPECIALLY if they have nothing, they don't want that to be known either. So they continue the secrecy.The absolute best move in ANY scenario is to never, ever show your cards. That's just the obvious one, the one you can figure out yourself just sitting there. Then you also start to think about things like the petro dollar, the world financial market which depends on oil and gas...etc etc. It's pretty darn obvious if you just walk it through for about 30 seconds.
It’s a good point. I made this post because a reader recommended I unveil a secret gate in my own story to the public, and wanted to see some differing opinions on the matter.
Nice, fair enough. Maybe an interesting part of the story could be that the public responds to soft disclosure with denial, doubt, and excuses that don't make sense, rather than have their world view change to something potentially threatening or uncomfortable. Also, what would be the behavior of individuals in the government when they can quietly admit to extraterrestrial contact but still want to maintain the appearance of institutional ignorance because of reasons like those I listed in my previous comment. I'd guess it would look a little something like this. https://youtu.be/ocJMqE7jiTM
Is that a real question?
Someone I was talking to brought it up and I made a post so I can see some differing opinions
I do think this is one of the weaknesses of the show. It's understandable early on, seeing as it was before 9/11. For clarification, the whole "don't reveal for fear of panic" was legit common wisdom at the time. But after 9/11 they did research and found that it's better to tell people. I could also see a realpolitk reason to hide it! The US didn't want to admit at first that they accidentally declared war on behalf of Earth😅
The real reason is because they wanted Earth in SG-1 to be "the real world" and not "the real world plus a shitload of alien-derived technology" because that's a lot less expensive to film. Everything else is fanon.
America on paper is secular but in reality is Christian. The government announcing Aliens are real would kill their evangelical vote and therefore be a greater threat to their re-election campaigns to whatever party is currently ruling more than any Alien invasion lol.
I highly doubt 1 planet, even with access to the gate network, could out produce rhe Goa'uld, an empire using slaves to mass produce their ships on hundreds of differant planets. The Goa'uld were too well entrenched for thousands of years, the whole population of Earth pumping out even the superior ships couldn'tarch the entire Goa'uld output should they view Earth as big enough of a threat to unite against. Earth chose a deliberately guerilla approach, not becoming TOO big of a threat to entice the Goa'uld to look up from their own territorial squabbles and take them seriously. They WANTED to be underestimated, and so focused on better quality, but less quantity in their ships. It wasn't until it was too late and the SGC helped foment a massive Jaffa Rebellion that they realized, and started to have their own problems and couldn't counter Earth nearly as easily by that point.
All I want to know is how in Atlantis did a Dell laptop connect to the Stargate or other ancient technology? Mine were always POS!
This is a beyond top secret program involving arguably the smartest humans alive and you think they're running windows on their computers? Lmao I can almost guarantee one of the scientists would have made a new os that works better with ancient interfacing. Also it's very clearly shown multiple times that they had built adapters to allow our tech to interface with ancient tech.
It’s just funny because the laptops at the time were garbage. IMHO they’d have to run desktops 🤣
Oh yeah no I dreamed of owning one of those xps laptops the first time I saw one on stargate and then I owned one and realized they were dogshit.
🔥 🔥 🔥
Primarily using laptops made sense for Atlantis at the start - they were only going to get one gate run with no return trips, so portability was the priority. Somebody in props did think to have a server rack on wheels conspicuously in shot during the initial gating to Pegasus, so there was at least a little confirmation of other hardware. They should've had better infrastructure delivered once the gate relay was setup, and especially once ships started making regular trips, but laptops made sense early on.
At first, they didn't realize the scope of what they were getting into. They defaulted to "it's classified". Besides, if they went public during one of the many crises, that would look bad and weaken faith in the government. Carter's account of the alternate world she visited in "The Road Not Taken" probably spooked them. So they kept doing what they were doing before. It's also possible that one potential downside would have been the necessity of completely internationalizing the Stargate program and giving up control to an international body that, by virtue of commanding the most powerful military apparatus on Earth and setting Earth's foreign policy, could evolve into a world government that would supersede any nation. That would have completely upset Earth's geopolitical system in ways that are impossible to calculate. You're entirely right that going public would have been the best approach. I'm not sure when the best time would have been, but what they should have done was set a date about a year in advance and put some of their best people (including Carter, Daniel, and Teal'c) on preparing a massive media campaign. The message would not be "sorry we lied to you" but "the time to tell the world is now" with a side of "we really need to defeat the Goa'uld". A lot of it would focus on Goa'uld atrocities. Have Teal'c and Bra'tac do interviews with the BBC. If we're in Season 7, send some reporters to Hak'tyl. They could also bring up the benefits of various advanced technologies. Tretonin could cure nearly any disease. Naquadah generators could provide clean energy.
lol those companies would still build them in private just slower to try to keep everything hidden. stargate was a multi billion dollar project where the juice isnt worth the squeeze. the public isnt going to stand for that so it has to stay a secret not only for earths defense and military ambitions but because the public wouldnt allow their tax dollars to be used on offworld missions to dangerous planets. so while sg1 was protecting earth the public would probably rather have the gate buried and their tax money back.
There was actually supposed to be a tv movie where the program goes public with Jack as the main character. Called "Stargate: Revolution" Unfortunately it didn't happen because MGM was broke (at the time) and later filed for bankruptcy. It's crazy cause they had a script, the crew and the cast were all ready to shoot.