The known history of the Starchild Skull begins in the 1930s, when an American teenage girl was on vacation with her family near Mexico's Copper Canyon region. She went exploring alone and found a long-abandoned mine tunnel. Inside it she found a full human skeleton lying on its back. Beside it was a grave-like mound of dirt with an arm bone sticking out of the dirt and the hand bones wrapped around the upper arm bone of the skeleton lying on the surface. Using her hands she dug the buried skeleton out of its shallow grave.

    The girl attempted to recover both skeletons but lost most of the bones in a flash flood. Ultimately, all she brought back to her home in El Paso was the two skulls, both somewhat battered in the flood, and a detached piece of maxilla that belonged to the "misshapen" skeleton she found in the grave. For the remainder of her life she kept both skulls in a cardboard box as souvenirs of her trip, assuming the odd looking skull was the result of some kind of human deformity.

    The woman died in the early 1990s, and in 1998 the two skulls were given to Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas. Melanie, a neonatal nurse and physical therapist who understood that the "misshapen" skull was in no way the result of a typical human deformity. She was determined to have it expertly evaluated to find out what it really was. To do that, she and her husband Ray enlisted the help of Lloyd Pye, an author and researcher in the field of alternative knowledge, who became the skull's caretaker and research coordinator.

    Lloyd Pye founded the Starchild Project in February of 1999, and in the course of the past ten years has overseen the scientific testing of the skull in three countries (the US, Canada, and England). While doing that he has regularly informed the media and the public about those results, and he continues to oversee ongoing research that will lead to an ultimate definitive conclusion about the unusual skull.