TV audiences are about to meet Ronnie Adkins. The co-host of HISTORY Channel’s The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries is bringing his experience to helping decode some of the most intriguing stories in the military realm, from missing soldiers to ghost armies—and he’s settling into his new role nicely. Watching the first episode of the new series, it doesn’t seem like he’s brand new to hosting television.
Before the April 22 premiere, I spoke with Ronnie about what brought him into television after the success he experienced hosting the Funker530 channel on YouTube, learning the ropes and what he appreciates about The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries. Learn more about him and the show in our interview—before watching the series at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on the HISTORY Channel.
Brittany Frederick: You’re known for your YouTube presence, so how did you manuever into television? What interested you in making that move?
Ronnie Adkins: HISTORY found a YouTube video that I put out there. My career was in evaluating combat footage; I’ve been doing that now for well over a decade. I now do that professionally, not just with this HISTORY Channel series. I’m super-excited about this show because the production capability that The HISTORY Channel and A+E Factual Studios group are able to bring to the table is far and beyond what I can do for YouTube.
After [their] finding my video and reaching out, it was initially just a quick conversation. But as time went along, I got the invitation to potentially host alongside one of my favorite people in the world, Rudy Reyes. I grew up watching Rudy and talking about Rudy, so getting the chance to work alongside him is a dream come true. I grew up watching the program Mail Call, with R. Lee Ermey screaming at us while he’s explaining some military nuance that the world just hadn’t seen before. This is just an evolution of that, and I’m so excited for it.
BF: What were the conversations you had with Rudy, who’s got that TV experience he brings, and as you two built your partnership for The Truth Is Out There: Military Mysteries?
RA: Rudy started kind of a brotherhood. We each had deployed to combat zones before. It started as just that military camaraderie, and transformed into a little bit of a mentorship. To be honest with you, it’s actually kind of a two-way street of a mentorship. I have done a lot of briefings and teleprompter type-stuff before.
It was really that iniitial mentorship that grew into a part of my family, one of my closest friends. Rudy and I converse almost daily, and he’ll send me selfies of him in Wales out there doing site recons for some of his other work. I’ve been watching Rudy since [the HBO miniseries] Generation Kill, going all the way back, and getting the chance to work alongside him is a dream come true. It really is.
BF: You’re speaking about subjects that are by their nature very technical, and you have to dig into lots of details about each story. How do you make the content digestible for The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries viewers, without losing any of its nuance?
RA: There’s a lot of detail in each one of these episodes. Each episode has multiple mysteries or stories that we’re jumping into and, for those veterans or current military that are watching, they’ll know it is an alphabet soup of acronyms that you can deal with at times. There were absolutely times that the production team would defer to me and Rudy; it happened quite a bit. Rudy and I had a very pretty heavy hand in helping to develop a lot of the feel, because it needed to be authentic.
The stories that we’re uncovering or that we’re talking about are real stories or real mysteries, if you will. They are not to detract from the paranormal that’s out there. These mysteries include what happened to the only pilot that got shot down during Desert Storm, because there’s a lot of mystery that surrounds that. The nuance that Rudy and I bring to the table is really two-fold, and I think that production did a fantastic job bringing two sides of the military coin to the table.
From Rudy’s perspective, you have one of the first troops that headed into the early Iraq War, fighting against the Republican Guard at the very forward edge. I bring a strategic intelligence perspective. I’ve been at multiple three-letter intelligence agencies. I’ve been a deception planner before. You’re really looking at it from two lenses at just about all times. [And] then you start to sprinkle in all of the experts that our series was able to bring in. We brought in historians, weapons experts, special operators, snipers. We’re covering and trying to uncover these mysteries from as many angles as possible. When it comes to that nuance, there were a lot of discussions of how to best discuss certain stories—for instance, when we’re talking about a POW or killed in action. I think that just brings the reality out of these situations.
BF: Were there any specific segments or episodes that stood out to you over the course of filming?
RA: My favorite episode we are coming out of the gate with, for our premiere. I’m so excited this is the one they picked. We’re talking about the Ghost Army. We’re going to be talking about one of American history’s little known units that had such a heavy impact on Allied success in World War II.
Not to give away anything, but being a former Information Operations guy, I put together deception plans. I tried to get the enemy to move left instead of moving right the way they wanted to. These are the kinds of stories I was really excited to see us cover. I am a war history nerd, almost by trade at this point. As the episodes go along, we’re covering other deception campaigns. We’re covering assassination attempts, or at least what we think are assassination attempts; there’s quite a few questions surrounding them. Missing pilots, chemical weapons, facilities that kind of go awry—there’s a lot of interesting stories. But the one right out of the gate here, that was one of my favorites.
BF: Is there anything that got left on the cutting room floor? Or anything else about The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries that surprised you?
RA: That’s where you start to talk about the amount of stories we have. First and foremost, there is enough mystery surrounding war. Throughout history, even when we’re really staying within the confines of modern warfare, there is so much depth to what could be discussed that answering that simply is extremely, extremely difficult. You can really take any one of the six segments that we divulge per episode and expand them into their very own episode. We’re looking at secret weapons like big, weird looking ball tanks. You could spend an entire dedicated episode on stuff like that. So distilling that down into something that summarizes it in a way that’s consumable [and] still provides the necessary time to unravel whatever it is that we’re looking at—I have to tip my hat to the team behind this.
This was all very new to me. I’m used to running my own lighting, my own cameras, maybe presenting a briefing to my military leadership, but when it came time to put all of this together, this was a whole new world. It is very, very much a team effort and that doesn’t even do it justice. All the way down to the simple movement of things on set. I grew up really having to do everything for ourselves and was very humble… At one point they needed to shift some of the items that were on the table in front of Rudy, and I go to reach up to do that, like, oh, it’s easy. It’s just a simple shift of something. No, no, no, there is a there is a gentleman or lady that it is his or her function solely to ensure the set and those items on set look exactly the way they’re supposed to.
From top to bottom, it really resonated with me how much of a team effort—again, effort still not being the best word to use here—this all really is. It’s not just turn the camera on and talk about a story. There’s so much energy that goes into it from a research perspective and editing perspective. I was floored by it all.
BF: So what has the experience of The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries meant to you? It’s obviously been a growth experience and then, hopefully, the audience is growing and benefiting from it as well.
RA: Personally, I have interviewed hundreds of people as part of my current role at Funker 530. We bring in experts from around the globe to talk about war, and we bring in those from on the ground to talk about war. I was one of those individuals that was, unfortunately, initially tasked to evaluate releases from the Islamic State when they were putting those out for targetable information. I’ve been with our three-letter intelligence agencies. I have been behind closed doors before. There are things that we are covering here that are only found in declassified documents. I don’t think that’s really been done before, especially not at the density that we’re doing it on [The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries]. We’re telling stories of POWs and forgotten units and differentiating between one country’s propaganda photo and our own.
It’s just so cool to me because again, this is what I do every day. I grew up in a very small town in rural Virginia, graduated high school, went straight into the army as an intelligence analyst. From there, I bounced around different units and different deployments and was selected for deployment with what I would consider to be our tip of the spear. That really exposed me to how we do war from a mission command perspective—mission command being the Army’s term for almost total warfare. How everything fits in with one another, how intelligence fits in with logistics and fits in with your strike force or your infantry.
This takes us all the way back to the two sides of the coin that they brought to the table here with Rudy and I. Rudy being very much so that guy that was kicking down doors, that was on the ground, that saw those things. And then from my perspective, what did this look like from a decision-making stance? What did this look like [on] a macro level? I just can’t be more excited about sharing this show with everybody, because so much energy, effort, and time really went into this and you can only get better. The first go-around is really the baseline. From here, we have tons and tons of more mysteries to cover. I am thrilled by the opportunity to dive in further and to make incremental improvements.
BF: As the TV audience meets you for the first time, is there anything that you want them to know about you?
RA: On a personal note, Rudy and I share a very fitness-heavy lifestyle. I personally am down to almost a little over 100 pounds from my heaviest, [which] would have been probably about a decade ago. It’s kind of an ongoing, never ending lifestyle change. Earlier, you asked a question about how do you and Rudy really mesh? I would say it’s really beyond working on the show that brought us together. We train and meet up now anytime we get a chance. Self-improvement and continuous dedicated, purposeful self-improvement every day is really important to us.
The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries premieres April 22 and airs Mondays at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on HISTORY. For more about Ronnie, follow him at ronnieadkins_ on Instagram and Twitter, and visit theFunker530 YouTube channel.
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