The "Stargate" film begins in 1928, when the alien device is first discovered and unearthed at Giza, with a young Catherine Langford watching as her father Paul, the archaeologist who found it, directs its unearthing. "Stargate SG-1" has since revealed more of the backstory of the Earth Stargate. The American ship "Achilles" brought the gate to America in 1939 to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazis. The United States Air Force then stored the device in various locations —including Washington, DC (Episode "1969")—before installing it at its location of the film and series. The Stargate was studied in the 1940s as a potential weapon and was later mothballed. As the "Stargate" film quickly skips to the "present day" (1994), unsuccessful archaeologist Daniel Jackson is giving a lecture about his outlandish theories that the pharaoh Khufu did not build the Great Pyramid of Giza. After he is laughed away, an aged Catherine Langford meets with him and recruits his egyptological talent, taking him to a top-secret military base at Cheyenne Mountain, where he is instructed to decipher the unique Egyptian hieroglyphs present on a set of cover-stones. He realizes that the indecipherable glyphs are not actually words but images of constellations, such that by identifying 6 of them a position in space can be extrapolated. He is then shown the stargate itself, uses his new understanding to identify the 7th symbol (the point of origin allowing a route to be extrapolated), and the gate is opened for the first time.