Ryan Sprague

Ryan Sprague belongs to a generation of UFO researchers who came of age not through military service or scientific credentials but through media: podcasting, cable television, and the interview format itself. Since the mid-2010s he has built one of the most recognizable brands in popular ufology, Somewhere in the Skies, turning long-form conversations with witnesses, scientists, and former intelligence officials into a #1 podcast, a pair of bestselling books, and a recurring seat on cable documentary television. He is less a field investigator in the classic MUFON mold than a documentarian and interlocutor — his central claim to significance is not a personal sighting file or a set of original discoveries, but decades of accumulated, recorded testimony that he has elicited, organized, and pushed into the mainstream.

Early life and the sighting that started it all

Born and raised in New York, Sprague traces his fascination with the UFO phenomenon to a personal sighting at around age twelve. As he has recounted in interviews, the experience was not dramatic in the way abduction narratives often are — no missing time, no perceived contact — but it was unresolved, and that unresolved quality is what stayed with him. In a 2016 interview with author Hunter Shea, Sprague described how that early encounter reoriented his reading and viewing habits toward the paranormal and eventually toward serious engagement with UFO case literature — Roswell, Rendlesham, the Betty and Barney Hill case, and the declassified U.S. government studies that had begun trickling into public view by the 2010s. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Sprague did not come to ufology from a background in the military, intelligence community, or the physical sciences; his training was in writing and performance (he has been described as a New York playwright), which shows in the narrative, character-driven style of both his podcast and his books. No source consulted discloses his exact birth year, though his career timeline — publishing his first book around 2018 and building sustained media momentum through the 2020s — places him solidly in the millennial cohort of ufology's newer, internet-native wave.

Somewhere in the Skies: podcast and platform

Sprague founded Somewhere in the Skies in 2017, initially self-produced before it was picked up by SpectreVision Radio, the production company co-founded by actor Elijah Wood, and later distributed via eOne. The show's format is deliberately conversational rather than adversarial or purely investigative: Sprague interviews witnesses alongside scientists, former military personnel, and intelligence-community figures, treating the UFO question as fundamentally a human-experience question rather than only a technical or evidentiary one. That approach paid off commercially — the podcast reached #1 on the Apple Podcasts charts in 2019 — and it gave Sprague a recurring platform to interview many of the figures who would become central to the disclosure era after 2017, including coverage tied to David Grusch's 2023 congressional testimony, Luis Elizondo's book releases, and documentary work involving Jeremy Corbell. The show continues to release new episodes roughly twice a week, a release cadence that has let Sprague accumulate hundreds of hours of on-record testimony — arguably his most durable contribution to the field's archive, whatever one makes of the underlying claims.

Books

Sprague's first book, an earlier edition titled Somewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to an Alien Phenomenon and carrying a foreword by fellow researcher Micah Hanks, established the framework he has stuck with since: individual witness narratives, treated with narrative care, bookended by his own reflections on what the accumulated testimony might mean. A later, updated and expanded edition, retitled Somewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, reached #1 on Amazon's bestseller list in its category and was notably adopted into coursework at Webster University and Mercyhurst University — a rare crossover into academic settings for a book from a non-academic UFO author, and one Sprague and his publisher have pointed to as evidence the work is taken seriously beyond fan circles.

His second book, Stories from Somewhere in the Skies, co-written with Dr. D.W. Paskula and published in 2023, mines years of podcast guest interviews into a curated anthology of first-person accounts. A review in Punk Rock and UFOs praised the book's literary quality, comparing Sprague's narrative voice to Rod Serling's — a comparison that captures both the appeal and the limitation of his approach: the stories are absorbing and well-told, but the book's methodology is closer to oral-history curation than forensic case investigation. Like its predecessor, it also reached #1 on Amazon's bestseller charts, underscoring the commercial strength of Sprague's brand even where independent verification of any single account is thin.

Television and mainstream media

Beyond print and audio, Sprague has become a familiar face on cable documentary programming. He serves as lead investigator and co-host of Mysteries Decoded on The CW, a recurring commentator on History Channel's long-running Ancient Aliens, an appearance on Travel Channel's Beyond the Unknown, and a co-host role on the Eastlink series Haunted. His media footprint extends to hard-news outlets as well — appearances on ABC News, CBS, Fox News, NewsNation, and Australia's 7News — plus consulting work for Amblin Entertainment and Netflix, and bylined contributions to The Debrief, Open Minds Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Post, and VICE. Taken together, this output places Sprague among the handful of UFO commentators who move fluently between niche podcast audiences and mainstream broadcast and print — a bridge role that has made him a go-to explainer figure for outlets covering the topic without a dedicated UFO desk.

Investigative approach and notable cases

Sprague describes his methodology as "human-centered" — prioritizing direct interviews with witnesses, military personnel, scientists, and intelligence officials over document-mining or purely statistical case analysis. He has investigated cases ranging from the canonical (Roswell, the 1976 Tehran incident) to more regional or under-covered sightings, including clusters of reports from Michigan. He has singled out the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident — in which U.S. Air Force personnel at RAF Woodbridge reported unexplained lights and an alleged landed craft near a site used to store nuclear weapons — as a case he considers particularly credible, citing both the number of military witnesses and the sensitivity of the location as reasons to take the case more seriously than most. This emphasis is characteristic of his broader stance: he tends to weight institutional witness credibility (military rank, security clearance, professional standing) heavily when assessing which cases merit sustained attention, a heuristic shared by much of the post-2017 disclosure-era press corps.

The disclosure era and Sprague's role within it

Sprague's career trajectory tracks closely with the broader "disclosure era" that opened after the 2017 New York Times AATIP story and accelerated through the 2020s with Pentagon UAP task force reports, congressional hearings, and whistleblower claims from figures like Grusch. He has positioned Somewhere in the Skies as a venue where these newly public figures can speak at length in a less adversarial setting than a network news segment allows, and his own commentary tends toward cautious openness: he treats the existence of a genuine, unexplained phenomenon as plausible and worth serious inquiry, while generally declining to assert specific extraterrestrial or exotic-technology conclusions on his own authority, preferring instead to let guests make their own claims on the record.

Reception and criticism

Reviews of Sprague's books have been largely favorable within UFO-interested media, praising his storytelling ability and the emotional texture he brings to witness accounts; the academic adoption of his first book is frequently cited by his supporters as a marker of credibility beyond fandom. At the same time, his critics — and skeptics of witness-testimony-driven ufology more broadly — note that Sprague's format privileges narrative resonance over evidentiary rigor: cases are compelling largely to the extent that witnesses are compelling narrators, and the podcast/book format offers little space for the kind of cross-examination, physical-trace analysis, or radar/photographic corroboration that would move a case from anecdote toward evidence. Sprague does not claim to be a scientist or an intelligence analyst, and generally frames his work as documentary and archival rather than adjudicative, which somewhat blunts this line of criticism — but it also means his catalog of cases, however large, functions more as a testimony archive than as an independently verified evidentiary record.

Legacy

Whatever the eventual resolution of the broader UFO question, Sprague's practical legacy is likely to be the archive itself: hundreds of recorded interviews with witnesses and officials, some of whom might not otherwise have gone on record, gathered under one long-running show and folded into two books that have reached a wider popular audience — including college classrooms — than most UFO literature manages. He remains an active figure in the field, based in Scotland and affiliated with UAPmediaUK, continuing to record and publish new witness testimony as the disclosure-era news cycle continues to generate fresh claims to document.