The strangest detail in Friday's UFO document dump was not a video. It was a receipt. The Pentagon released an expense report showing the Defense Intelligence Agency spent $22 million investigating Utah's Skinwalker Ranch, and according to Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy, senior White House officials now say they cannot find any copy of those records. The missing Skinwalker Ranch documents are the real story hiding inside a headline about aliens.

On Friday, the Department of Defense published another set of UFO-related files, including witness accounts and photographs of unidentified objects, as reported by The U.S. Sun. Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell said the release was the sixth batch of declassified and historical UAP records under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE, with more documents coming on a rolling basis through the department's website.

A 59-page expense report with no paperwork

Tucked into the batch was a 59-page expense report covering DIA spending in 2008 and 2009, with individual line items of $2.8 million, $3.6 million, and $2.1 million. The funds went to a government contractor, a company owned by billionaire Robert Bigelow, to investigate anomalous phenomena connected to Skinwalker Ranch. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid secured the $22 million in funding back in 2008.

The spending is documented. The findings are another matter. "Senior White House officials are telling me they cannot find any copy of the records," Doocy said after a private briefing inside the West Wing, according to The U.S. Sun. "They've got all the proof that this government contractor was spending $22 million to do this investigation." In other words, the Skinwalker Ranch documents show the money went out, but officials cannot produce the records showing what investigators actually concluded. Conservative Brief reported that officials told Doocy the reports detailing the investigation's conclusions either cannot be located or are no longer available to the people conducting the review.

Why anyone spent $22 million on a ranch

Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre private property in Utah's Uintah Basin, near the town of Ballard. For decades it has been famous for reports of UFO sightings, strange lights, alleged flying objects, cattle deaths, and unusual electromagnetic activity. The ranch's reputation is what made it a target for federal money in the first place.

Bigelow investigated the reports through his own research operation before entrepreneur Brandon Fugal bought the property in 2016 and assembled a team of scientists and researchers to study the reported phenomena. Their work became the History Channel's The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Ranch superintendent Thomas Winterton, who joined the operation in 2016, has said his experiences there changed his initially skeptical view, describing severe dizziness, electronic malfunctions, unidentified objects, and unusual telescope readings near an area known as the Triangle.

The rest of the sixth batch

The Skinwalker Ranch documents were not the only items in the release. One video, recorded in 1952 by Navy aerial photographer Delbert Newhouse along a Utah highway, was presented as previously unseen footage. Doocy said officials found the original film in the National Archives and digitized it in 4K. Newhouse described 12 objects flying in formation. The Sun noted, however, that the clip had reportedly appeared before, in the 1956 docudrama Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers. We covered that footage and its unresolved history in more detail here.

A second video was recorded by a Colorado law enforcement officer on an iPhone in 2023. Doocy said the officer described multiple orbs hovering near a sensitive military installation for stretches of about 15 minutes, though the officer's narration and nearby buildings were redacted from the public release. A third video, captured by a drone over the Middle East in 2025, showed six objects flying in formation, destination unknown. Doocy emphasized that officials had not determined what the objects in any of the videos were.

The Defense Department said it was not providing an overall assessment or commenting on individual files, and urged the public to draw its own conclusions. As analysts noted in the case summaries, "unresolved" means there is not enough information to reach a clear conclusion, not proof of alien life. The release drew mixed reactions online: some users argued the White House was using the UFO files to divert attention from other issues facing the administration, while others dismissed the material as underwhelming.

For a file dump billed as transparency, the headline takeaway is a gap. The government has declassified proof that it spent $22 million looking into one of the weirdest places in America, and the documents describing what it found have simply vanished from the record. That is the part conspiracy theorists will be talking about for years. For another look at how a famous conspiracy theory holds up decades later, see our breakdown of 9/11 theories, 25 years on.