Stories about UFOs…that is the subject of today’s show. Our guest is author, podcaster and Ufologist Ryan Sprague who shares some of his most captivating tales.
You can find his new book of stories from his popular podcast, Stories From Somewhere In The Skies, at Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3nPVgC3
Thanks Ryan!
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TRANSCRIPT
JIM HAROLD: Time is growing short to get your tickets to my stories From Around the Campfire Tour. We’ll be in Philly, Pittsburgh, Boston, and the Big Apple, New York City. I hope to see you there! Get your tickets today at jimharold.com/tour. That’s jimharold.com/tour. And now, on to the Paranormal Podcast.
[intro music]
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again. I think we are going to have a fantastic show today. I know we will, because our guest is Ryan Sprague, ufologist, podcaster, author extraordinaire, and we’re going to talk about his new book, Stories From Somewhere in the Skies. It’s a compilation I think of 50 different stories from UFO experiencers. I got a sneak peek at it – the book is available everywhere now, of course, but I got a sneak peek of it and it is fantastic. I highly recommend it. Ryan, Thank you for joining us today on the show.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Always a pleasure, Jim. As soon as the book came out, I said, “Who do I want to talk to most about the new book? Who will really appreciate these stories that I’ve collected?” And you were the first person that I reached out to and said, “Hey, I’m doing the interview circuit.” I don’t do many, but when I do do them, I want to do them right. It’s always an honor to be here.
JIM HAROLD: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I have to admit this; I think we were talking offline – you’ve been on the show 13 times or something, and we always chat back and forth and email. Something I’d actually forgotten, though: you yourself, and you reference this in the introduction of your book, are a UFO experiencer. Just to set the table, can you tell us a little bit about your experience and what happened to you at a very young age?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Absolutely, yeah. This happened when I was 12 years old, actually. I was in Central New York with my mother, father, and sister. We would go on these weekend getaways upstate in New York, off the St. Lawrence River – which was funny; this river was right on the border of New York State. Canada was right on the other side. I could literally wave to the other side of the river and have the nice, friendly, polite Canadians wave back.
I loved to fish when I was a kid. I’d pop in my headphones and I would listen to Green Day. That’s bringing you back to like the mid-1990s for sure. I would just listen to music, zone out, and fish for hours. It was turning dark, and there was a Yankees game that was about to start, so my father was inside getting ready to watch the game; I was getting ready to pack everything up and go inside, and I’m reeling my line in from fishing and I saw these white lights in the water. I was like, “That’s weird. What are these lights doing in the water?”
I bend down on the dock that I was on and I look and I realize, “Oh, they’re not in the water. It’s a reflection.” So I flip over on my back, I look up in the sky, and that was it. That’s when my life changed. I saw a perfect equilateral triangle with three white lights on each corner, kind of this prototypical black triangle as people call it, with a red light in the middle. I didn’t see the structure to this thing, machinery or anything like that. I just saw the perfect shape of this thing. But I couldn’t see stars or anything behind it.
Naturally, I thought this was a craft of some sort, unlike anything I’d ever seen in terms of a conventional airplane or something, and I was scared. I didn’t know what I was looking at. It was huge, it was silent, made no noise. I yelled for my dad to stop watching this New York Yankees game and come out and look at this thing with me, and he did. He came outside, he came on the dock, and we both looked at this black triangle just float effortlessly over the water and head towards Canada and eventually disappear out of sight.
That’s when everything changed for me. I was terrified of what I’d seen. My father never wanted to talk about it, ever, so I kind of kept it to myself. I had nightmares about it for years and years. Eventually I tripped upon a UFO book in the library and learned that that’s what I saw: a UFO, something I couldn’t identify. It was off to the races from there, Jim. I conducted my first interview with a UFO witness a year later, when I was 13, and that’s when my UFO research truly started, one year after my sighting.
JIM HAROLD: Is it fair to say had that not happened, had you not had that experience, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking today?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Not unless you had a baseball podcast, because again, the Yankees – we live, breathe, and sleep those in New York. My dad wanted me to be a pro ball player. I played a little in college. I honestly thought maybe that’s what I’d do with my life. But that night on that dock changed my entire course and path that I went on. Instead of becoming a baseball player, I’m now a ufologist. So there you go, Dad. I hope he’s proud of that. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: There you go. And as we record this on May 3rd, your Yankees just destroyed my Guardians.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Oh no.
JIM HAROLD: So used to that. So used to that over the years with the Guardians and previously the Indians. Many times on the losing side of that equation with the New York Yankees – the mighty New York Yankees.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Now, I’ve got to believe that you being an experiencer, and maybe having that experience with your dad where he didn’t want to talk about it and things, has informed the way that you in turn interact with other experiencers. Is that right?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Absolutely. I empathize. I can literally say I know how you felt or I know how you’re feeling, the struggle a UFO witness goes through when they see something like that. They don’t want to talk about it because they think people are going to think they’re crazy. I’ve been there. I stayed quiet for decades until I started really coming out and talking about what I’d seen. And then of course everything changed in 2017 when UFOs seemingly went mainstream and it was much more widely accepted to talk about these things. But it wasn’t like that for a really long time, and it was hard to find people to come forward and talk about these things.
But slowly but surely, I started reaching out to people and people started reaching out to me. That’s where the podcast was born, Somewhere in the Skies. It was a place where people could come and tell their stories without judgment, without ridicule, without even someone telling them what they saw or didn’t see – just to get it out there and have someone listen. That’s what I wanted when I was a kid, but nobody would listen. My friends thought I was crazy. My dad never wanted to really talk about it. He does now, in today’s world of UFOs. But it was very hard for a very long time, for sure.
JIM HAROLD: You get these stories on your podcast, Somewhere in the Skies – folks, if you haven’t checked it out, you really should. If you’re listening to this, you’re interested in the topic, so why not go right to the source and listen to that great podcast? But in addition, there have to be certain stories that rise above. What was the criteria for including a story in this new book, Stories From Somewhere in the Skies?
RYAN SPRAGUE: At this point I’m up to about 28 volumes of a series on my podcast that I call “Witness Accounts.” Again, this is just people calling in and telling their story uncensored. I don’t interject. It’s not an interview. It’s just them recalling what happened to them, in their own words, in their own voice. I thought it’d be pretty cool to do a “greatest hits” version of this and bring it to life on the page. So I spoke to my publishers, Beyond the Fray Publishing, and I said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea for a book where I compile the most credible cases and the most compelling cases that have ever come to my podcast.” They loved it. They loved the idea.
So then I had to sit down, Jim – and this was really fun and rewarding for me – I sat down and listened to all, I think 26 at that point, volumes of witness accounts from start to finish. Hundreds of stories. It was like reliving it all over again in terms of my own sighting and when these people first reached out and told their stories. I started jotting down, “This one’s interesting,” “This compares to this one, let’s put those two next to each other in the book,” or stuff like that. It was kind of like piecing a puzzle together to make the book of these 50 stories.
In terms of criteria, it really came down for me to the stories that resonated most with me as a UFO witness myself, how I felt during it, what it was like seeing something like that. I really tried to dig deep into the archives and find those stories where people got very personal and were very vulnerable and open to not only sharing what they saw, but how it made them feel and how it changed their lives. That’s my big thing in the UFO world: not so much what was the UFO, but how did the UFO affect you, how did it change you. That’s what I did. I tried to find the stories that ultimately changed people’s perspectives, their lives, and how it did that.
I broke the book down into three sections: Sightings, Close Encounters, and Military Incidents. In each section of those, you will find some of the most unique stories of UFOs you’ve ever heard. Not just flying saucers in the sky, but some of the weirdest type of UFO encounters I’ve personally ever come across.
JIM HAROLD: Have you over the years devised or developed a bit of a spidey sense in terms of when people are being straight with you and when they’re – I’m sure that from time to time, you’ll get somebody who submits a story where it’s like, “yeah right.” Have you developed that spidey sense where you can say this person, regardless of what they actually saw, they’re being very authentic and being very genuine about what they felt they saw?
RYAN SPRAGUE: I’d like to think so. I’d like to think at this point I have a gut feeling when someone is BSing me or not, as they say. I’ll be honest: I don’t believe that happens that often. You said “this person truly believes this happened to them” – that’s true. I honestly feel, no matter what it was they saw or what it actually was, it’s what they saw. It was their “truth.” And I don’t want to take that away from them. All I want to do is give them a place where they can tell their story and possibly try to find some answers to what they saw.
So yeah, I’ve come across times in the past where people, I’m sure, have lied to me or made something up. I don’t personally believe that. For at least these 50 stories that I told in this version, I do stand by them, that these individuals firmly believe these events happened to them. And again, no matter what it was, it did something to them. And that means more to me than what it actually was they saw in the skies.
JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting because I do the Campfire show, and it’s broader – it’s ghosts and a lot of different other things – but one thing that has surprised me over the years is the lack of that kind of stuff. One time, I’m sure that somebody was trying to sneak through like a Howard Stern thing. I’m sure they were by a catchphrase they used. They didn’t know I was a listener.
But over the years I could probably count on one hand where I thought somebody was just making something up, and I didn’t air those stories. The vast, vast, vast majority of people are extremely sincere. I’m always very impressed by that, and pleasantly surprised, I must say, after years of doing the show. Just amazing to me that people really mean this stuff. They really believe they saw what they saw, they experienced what they experienced, whether it’s the ghostly realm or, in your case, the UFO realm.
So over time – and I want to get to some of the actual stories, but have you seen an arc of common themes – things that independently keep cropping up again and again?
RYAN SPRAGUE: I look for patterns just like anyone else. A lot of my research and what I do, I take after the great Jacques Vallée and how he looked at this topic from a very cultural perspective – whether it’s through someone’s belief system or framework, how they interpret a sighting that they had. That’s the way I approach what I do, too. I don’t necessarily look for commonalities in the shape of a UFO or a time or location. What I look for is the commonalities in how people react to these things or what they take away from it.
I would say one of the biggest things I’ve walked away with in my research and in having hundreds and hundreds of stories at this point is how it changes people spiritually. I know that can be a hot button issue and there’s been books written about UFOs and religion. A lot of people believe UFOs are a religion, a belief system. But for me, it wasn’t so much believing in the UFOs; it was almost enhancing or amplifying their belief systems and their spiritualism, which I found fascinating. Someone who was let’s say Christian or Jewish or any type of religion who had a sighting, it didn’t turn them away from whatever religion they practiced or turn them away from the church; it made them think, “Whoa, there’s more to this than I ever thought,” and integrating that into their new framework, into their religion. I found that fascinating.
I would say a healthy amount of the cases that have come to me, it has changed people spiritually, and I think that’s really, really cool. Your religion doesn’t have to be a hindrance to this experience you had, or vice versa. It can now become a new part of it. So yeah, I think we’ve only scratched the surface of that entire evolution in thought when it comes to UFOs. I’m going to keep recording them and see if this is a continual pattern, but yeah, I find it absolutely fascinating.
JIM HAROLD: After this break, we are going to get to some actual stories, some of Ryan’s most amazing and favorites – right after this on the Paranormal Podcast.
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If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire, where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now, we return to the Paranormal Podcast.
JIM HAROLD: We are back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest today is Ryan Sprague and we’re talking about his new book, Stories From Somewhere in the Skies. His excellent podcast as well. Be sure to check them both out. Ryan, now is the time when the rubber meets the road. We’re going to ask you for some stories.
There’s one here you said was maybe your favorite in the book: “The Bubbling Black Blob of Fife.” That sounds like – you’re too young to remember this, but Johnny Carson used to do the Carnac thing, and he would say something and Ed McMahon would mimic him and say it again –[imitates Ed McMahon] “The Bubbling Black Blob of Fife. I did not know that.” [laughs] The Bubbling Black Blob of Fife. Tell us about that story.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Sure. I titled all these stories in a fun and unique way because a lot of these stories are fun and unique, and I wanted to give it a fresh angle. It wasn’t just your prototypical “date, time, location,” that’s it. I wanted to bring these stories to life. The Bubbling Black Blob of Fife is definitely one of the weirdest UFO sighting cases I came across. In the book, you’ll read about lights in the sky, orbs, saucers, black triangles, but this one really stood out to me. This story was actually submitted to me within the first couple weeks of the Somewhere in the Skies podcast, so I had to really dig deep back into the archives for this one. I’d almost forgotten about it, so I’m so happy that this project came about and I revisited it.
This one happened back in 1996 in Fife here in Scotland, where I currently reside. There was a young guy named Tommy. He was a teenager at the time and he was riding his bike home with a friend, and as they were riding down the road, they came across this almost oil slick in the middle of the road. You know, Jim, how in the road, when the gas or oil starts to collect there, you’ll get that kind of rainbow effect in the puddle or what have you and little heat waves coming off, blah, blah, blah.
That’s what they thought this was. They tried to ride their bikes around it, not get the tires all oiled up. As they’re getting closer to this “oil slick,” they notice that it started bubbling, almost like it was boiling, cooking in the road. That definitely stops them, and they’re looking at this thing and it starts growing, almost as if oil was coming through the road and starting to – I don’t know, almost like a volcano about to erupt in the middle of the street.
They continue watching it, and as it’s bubbling, they notice that this black blob, as they would eventually call it, started levitating a couple feet off the ground.
JIM HAROLD: Whoa.
RYAN SPRAGUE: So clearly this wasn’t just an oil slick in the middle of the road. Tommy believed this thing was organic. It had a life to it. It got bigger. It would contract, it would get bigger, it would contract. And it would change shape. It was amorphous. It would hover a few feet off the ground, go back down, go a little higher, and it just kept doing this. He and his friend just watched in awe.
If that weren’t weird enough, it started making this really earth-shattering noise. They had to cover their ears, it was so deafening loud. And it smelled horrible, he said. He said it was one of the worst odors he’s ever smelled in his life. All of their senses are in overdrive at this point – what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing, what they’re smelling of this black blob.
Eventually it keeps ascending into the sky, and as it’s doing that, it gets louder, louder, and they could feel this electricity all around them. It was almost as if this thing was about to just take off into the sky by some sort of electrical force. And as soon as it did – and it did eventually shoot off into the sky – there was an explosion of light. The earth-shattering noise disappeared, and this black blob was completely gone.
So there you go. The Bubbling Black Blob of Fife. Not a kind of UFO I’ve ever come across before, but no matter what it was, this was an unidentified flying blob, as it were.
JIM HAROLD: We think of the prototypical you see a saucer, you see a shape, kind of like what you saw, maybe triangular – even the most extraordinary cases of close encounters where you see something like an Alien Grey or what’s perceived to be an Alien Grey – but how many outliers do you have like this bubbling black blob that are just totally outside of it? Is that pretty rare, or more often than you think?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Extremely rare. Jim, these are the kind of cases that really scream to me “this happened.” It’s too weird to have made this up, in my opinion. Again, going back to that gut reaction, when Tommy told the story, at first I’m like, “What in the world? I can’t cover this! No one will take this seriously!” And now, as my ufology has evolved, I’m realizing the weirder the story, the more apt I am to believe that this actually did occur.
With this one, I’d never heard something like this before, ever. We’ve heard of UFOs looking organic or plasma-like energies, this, that, but I’ve never heard of a case where something was on the ground, levitated, ascended into the sky, and also had all these other weird physiological effects on people. This is unlike any case I’ve ever come across, so I had to cover it in the book.
JIM HAROLD: Do you find the more you get into this topic, the wider it becomes? In other words, I know when I first started doing these shows back in 1912 [laughs], I had a very narrow definition of what a UFO was, or a very narrow definition of what a ghost was, or whatever the phenomenon was. It was like, “Oh, that’s that.” I was very certain of what a UFO was. “Of course it’s aliens.” I was very certain of what a ghost is. “It’s a dead person.” But over time, I’ve become I guess less certain, more confused, and more accepting of a wider definition of any of these phenomena. Do you notice that with you and your work with UFOs?
RYAN SPRAGUE: I do. Forgive me if I’m getting the quote wrong – you might be able to correct me, Jim, but I feel like it’s “the more you learn, the less you know.” Is that kind of the saying?
JIM HAROLD: Exactly, yeah.
RYAN SPRAGUE: I feel like that’s it. The more I hear these stories, the more I try to understand them, the less I do. And that’s kind of how I’ve always viewed the UFO phenomenon. It’s always two steps ahead of us, always. While that might be frustrating, for anyone who looks into the paranormal or UFOs might be seeking answers, for me that journey has been so much more rewarding. I don’t even know if I want the answers to what the bubbling black blob was or all these other stories in the book and whatnot. I just love hearing from these people, meeting these people, looking them in the eyes and them telling the most profound stories to me.
So yeah, I’ve definitely opened up as a researcher and investigator. While I once thought maybe all of this was alien or possibly military top secret advanced projects happening, we’re not dealing with one thing here, clearly. Clearly. There’s a million different reasons, sources, answers, for what I think the UFO phenomena represent. I think we’re only scratching the surface with it.
JIM HAROLD: Do you think part of it is – for example, that would be a case where I could say maybe it was something else masquerading as a black blob. Do you think there is a trickster element to at least some of this?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Absolutely. Again, going back to the work of Jacques Vallée, there’s always been a tricksterish nature to all of this. Again, if we are to hypothesize that whatever intelligence does lie behind some if not all of these phenomena – that they are highly advanced and that they can mess with our perception – and when you mix perception with human interpretation, you’re never going to truly know or understand what it is that’s going on. So I do believe that a lot of this is almost performative on the part of the phenomena. This could just be one big performance piece for them, or art project, to see how we react or how we interpret what they’re doing.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it’s like performance artists.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Yes, exactly.
JIM HAROLD: Who will sit on an empty stage with a roll of toilet paper and do nothing, that kind of thing.
RYAN SPRAGUE: [laughs] Exactly.
JIM HAROLD: Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is AI. I’ve always felt the old answer that you get from the mainstream science folks – and again, I’m hearing that less these days, but the whole “It couldn’t possibly be an alien source in some of these cases because the distances are too far.” I’m like, duh, yeah, for us. Not necessarily for them. But I’ve always, up until this point, thought about it from a biological standpoint in that with these advanced races of potentially aliens or interdimensional travelers or whatever they are, they’re just so far ahead of us in their evolution that they’re many, many, many times smarter than we are and more accomplished scientifically.
But I wasn’t even thinking about a force multiplier like artificial intelligence. If they have at their disposal highly advanced artificial intelligence, there’s no telling how far they’ve gotten or even if they’re biological. Is that something you’ve been thinking about lately with all the AI stuff in the news?
RYAN SPRAGUE: It is. The AI conversation is growing and evolving every day. No matter where you land on it, we’re in the infancy of discussing it and truly understanding its implication, whether good or bad. You would assume that some advanced intelligence somewhere else would’ve cracked that code already, would’ve been using it for a very long time, and that could very well be how they have gotten to our planet.
We send probes to planets that we go look at, so why wouldn’t a more advanced civilization do the same thing – and possibly have mastered that at this point. Or could these “extraterrestrials” that people have claimed to have witnessed or encountered be a form of artificial intelligence? The Greys, many say, lack emotion, lack empathy, seem to be robotic. And this is just whispers of what we would consider artificial intelligence, something that has been programmed to do a task. It doesn’t care about what you think or how you feel; it’s simply doing the task it was programmed to do.
So I think that’s very possible. There’s a case in the book where a girl out of Ohio, actually, when she was seven years old, she saw a flying saucer in her backyard, but what stood out to me about this is she said it was as small as you can possibly imagine. It was a mini saucer, she called it. She said there’s no way there was something inside of there. Unless it was like an infant child piloting that thing, this was some sort of probe or something. So there could be an example right there in Stories From Somewhere in the Skies of a possibly AI-generated probe visiting our planet and coming to check out Ellie, the girl’s name was, in Ohio. I honestly can’t tell you.
But I think as we further the conversation with AI, it could maybe give us some answers to some of the stuff we’re looking at in the skies. That goes for how we are trying to track and collect data on these UFOs, too. There’s an app coming out in the coming months where you can upload your UFO report and sighting to the app, and the AI-generated algorithms will put it into a huge database, and then that gets filtered up to this, to that, to this, to that, until eventually, hopefully, we can explain away some of these UFO sightings.
So it works both ways. Some of these UFOs could be AI, and in the meantime, we’re trying to understand them with AI. I find it fascinating. It’s a feedback loop of cosmic proportions. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Another point I’ll bring up quickly on the AI question, and then I want to get to another story – I just read in the news over the last two or three days that – it might’ve been in Texas, I’m not sure. Or it may be in China. Texas or China. But somewhere in some laboratory, what they’ve been able to do is they’ve taken a person and trained them on a list of words, and then they put them through an MRI and have them think of certain words. Through the MRI and the use of AI, they’re able to “read the mind” of the person, what they’re thinking about, just by that imaging.
Now, again, that’s a far way from true telepathy, but I compare it to the old computers they had in the ’50s, the ENIAC computer that would take a whole huge room, and now my iPhone I’m holding up has way more power. So it’s early days for humanity. But I think most people have thought, when they hear these stories of telepathy and “aliens,” that it’s almost a supernatural ability and those kinds of things. But who knows? Maybe it’s totally technological and the supposed ability that “aliens” or “the Others,” as Whitley Streiber calls them – this ability that they have is not at all supernatural; it’s some type of technology. They have a device or it’s implanted, and that’s how they’re able to communicate by thought alone. Your thoughts?
RYAN SPRAGUE: I always go back to that idea of science and technology being indistinguishable from magic.
JIM HAROLD: Arthur C. Clarke.
RYAN SPRAGUE: There you go right there. I think that’s a fascinating theory that you brought forward, Jim. While they may look at it as “this is something we’ve been working on technologically for decades or millennia,” it’s going to look supernatural to us human beings who have yet to understand how that works. So yeah, again, I think a lot of this probably does have to do with time and advancements and where we lie in that galactic federation out here. We might just be the cavemen still when it comes to what we can truly do. And we see that represented through some of these possible occupants or intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon.
JIM HAROLD: It’s been great fun, but I’m not going to let you go without you sharing maybe your weirdest story. Tell us what you consider maybe the weirdest story. I know you had one cued up.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Yeah. I did the third section of the book on military encounters, a section that I thought would be very rigid, very evidence-based, very to the point. “I saw this and this and that.” That’s great. Trained observers, a lot of these military people are. I wanted to put that section last because I thought it would hit people the hardest in terms of legitimacy.
Little did I know that the military section would actually be one of the weirdest sections of the book. [laughs] Which really surprised me. That actually came in the form of one of the first stories I tell in that section. Mind you, all these military incidents in the book, Jim, some of them are being heard for the first time; all of them happened on military bases, during service. We’re not talking 20 years later when these people were out of the service. This happened while they were in the service.
This one happened back in 2009 to a woman named Dalen in Australia, actually, of all places. She spent 15 years in the Australian Defense Forces as a weapons and radar technician. For her last four years in the service, she was a dog handler with the military police. There was one night when she was out on the base and they got a call from one of their mutual military police officers: “I’m seeing something weird over the flight path. Can you guys come check this out?”
So she and her partner and the dog that she was handling at the time went out, and they saw in the sky – I think it was three or four white lights I a perfect “V” formation, just hovering over the flight path. That’s a little weird. She didn’t remember any incoming or outgoing flights that night, so she actually radioed the flight tower and said, “What’s going on here? Are you guys expecting a landing or a takeoff or something?” They said, “No, we’ve got nothing. Why? What’s going on?” She said, “We’re physically seeing right now above the base this weird formation of lights.” They’re like, “Huh, we got nothing. Keep an eye on it. Let us know. Maybe it’s just passing by in a restricted flight path and it shouldn’t be there.”
So she and her partner keep watching, keep watching, and that’s when Dalen noticed not so much what was in the sky, but on the ground. She’s looking out over the flight path, which is full of brush – this is out in a very remote part of the Outback, very desert-like, and in one of the bushes she sees an orange flickering light. A little odd. Maybe someone’s out there with a flashlight, so they get a little closer, and she notices that it’s huge. It’s massive. Just a big orange fireball. So immediately, she’s like, “Oh my God, there’s a brushfire! I’ve got to phone the fire department!” So she does. She gets the fire department to come out to maybe put out a brushfire out there. That was common at times.
As they’re watching it and waiting for the fire department to show up, this fireball starts – just like the Bubbling Black Blob of Fife – starts to levitate off of the ground. This is when everything went haywire. The craft in the sky started pulsating and becoming very active. Meanwhile, this orange ball of light is getting bigger and brighter and brighter. Her dog was terrified. She wanted to get closer to investigate; the dog did not want to. So she actually tied it up, and she and her partner went forward.
When they got closer to whatever this fireball was, Jim, Dalen saw in the middle of this fireball a figure. Just some sort of figure right in the middle of this big orange sphere. I actually have a quote here from her. It was not a full figure; I should make that very clear. She said: “It looked like there was a pair of legs. Not like standing there burning, but the shape of legs. There was no body attached to it. No feet. All I could see was a pair of skinny little calves, knees, and thighs.”
JIM HAROLD: Huh.
RYAN SPRAGUE: So weird. They’re watching this thing floating there, this half-body figure within this ball of fire, UFO overhead, pulsating. Fire department shows up, and as soon as they show up, it’s like a light switch was switched off. The fireball disappears, gone in an instant. She gets the fire people, “We’ve got to go see what that was!” They go up to it and all they see is, on the ground, a perfect elliptical almost impression on the ground of ash and sand. But none of the vegetation around that area was burned. There was no smoke. There was no smell of burning. So whatever that isolated fireball was, it left almost no physical trace evidence except for this pile of ashes. UFO above eventually disappears, and that was it.
Dalen goes to report this to her commander; he immediately makes her and her partner take a drug test.
JIM HAROLD: Oh man.
RYAN SPRAGUE: They pass with flying colors, and then all her commander said was, “You made up the second part of that. Maybe something was over the base, but you did not see what you said you saw. You will not write any of this into a report, and you’re on desk duty for the next two weeks.”
JIM HAROLD: Whoa. Dang.
RYAN SPRAGUE: And that was it. Dalen had never talked about this, Jim, and then out of the blue, she heard the Somewhere in the Skies podcast, reached out to me, told this story. I checked her credentials; she’s legit. Everything matched up. It’s just one of those stories where you’re left scratching your head more than ever with the Fire Figure in the Outback.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. Wasn’t there a military program – I don’t know if it was Project Blue Beam or something like that, where the military would try to – the idea was in a battle, they would project a religious figure or something in the sky. Am I remembering this right?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Yes. Nick Redfern has talked about this a lot in his research as well, these hologram things, almost, being used – whether on our own military, to kind of train them and test them, or on adversaries. It’s been done. Could this be one of those? Very possible.
JIM HAROLD: Could be. Or it could be alien, possibly. But that’s really interesting. And his visceral reaction to it. It almost is like “thou doth protest too much,” right?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Right.
JIM HAROLD: It’s like, either you know we’re doing something along those lines, or you know someone else is doing something along those lines. Why would you have that visceral reaction unless there was something based in serious reality in that? I think that’s almost proof itself.
RYAN SPRAGUE: It is. It really leaves you wondering. It really does.
JIM HAROLD: Indeed. As does the book, Stories From Somewhere in the Skies. I believe everybody should listen to the podcast Somewhere in the Skies and also pick up the book. Ryan, along those terms, where can people find the book?
RYAN SPRAGUE: Thank you, Jim. You can find it through Beyond the Fray Publishing. It’s in Barnes and Noble, I’ve been told as of this morning. But the easiest way to get it is right on Amazon. It’s in paperback and eBook and soon to be an audiobook as well. I’m working right now on that diligently. I know that’s a big thing nowadays as podcasters, we know. So yes, working on the audiobook. But they can find the book and everything I do simply at somewhereintheskies.com.
JIM HAROLD: Everybody check out everything Ryan does, including this new book. He’s one of the best. Ryan, thank you for joining us today on the Paranormal Podcast.
RYAN SPRAGUE: Thank you so much, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Always so great to catch up with Ryan. He is fantastic, as is his new book, and his podcast. So be sure to check all of that out.
Something else I hope you’ll check out is my tour. Jimharold.com/tour. That’s where you can get your tickets to our shows coming up in June in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. And I hope to see you there! We’re going to have a great, interactive event. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, and I hope, again, that you’ll get your tour tickets if you are in the area. Stories From Around the Campfire. That’s my tour coming up the end of June. Be sure to get your tickets today, jimharold.com/tour.
Thank you so much for joining us today on the Paranormal Podcast. We’ll talk to you next time. Stay safe and stay spooky! Bye-bye, everybody.
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