He is actually now 10 years old
Meet the 10-year-old son of Baptist parents who has baffled experts with his vivid and accurate accounts of a past life dancing on Broadway and acting opposite Mae West
He has acted opposite Mae West, tripped the light fantastic on The Great White Way and even partied with Rita Hayworth - and now Ryan is sharing his stories about life during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The only problem is that Ryan is a 10-year-old boy from Muskogee, Oklahoma who was born to Baptist parents. The amazing life he describes belongs to actor and Hollywood agent Marty Martin.
Ryan says it was his past life.
His vast knowledge, vivid recollections and stunningly accurate descriptions of the era have convinced even experts that the young man may have in fact been reincarnated.
It all began when Ryan was just 4 years old, his mother Cyndi told Today. She says he began having nightmares that neither she or her husband, a local police officer, could find a way to stop.
He would talk about his heart exploding and, more than anything, Hollywood, a place that was thousands of miles away from Oklahoma.
What's more, the reserved youngster would always speak in a matter-of-fact manner during these times.
Then, after a year of this, he finally sat down his mom.
'He said "Mom, I have something I need to tell you,"' said Cyndi.
'I used to be somebody else.'
Having been raised Baptist, Cyndi did not believe in reincarnation or past lives, and decided to hide her son's admission from his father.
But she slowly became curious and then somewhat convinced the more her son spoke of Hollywood, his five marriages, lavish trips to Europe, his old homes and how all his acting clients kept changing their last names, so she decided to start doing some research on Hollywood during the studio era and shared some of the books she found at the local library with her son.
Then, one day, Ryan had a breakthrough when he saw a still from the from the 1932 movie Night After Night starring Mae West.
'That's me,' Ryan told his mother.
Ryan was pointing to an extra in the film, a man with no lines that they later learned was bit-actor-turned-agent Marty Martin.
That is when Cyndi decided Ryan should talk to someone, and the family found Dr. Jim Tucker, a highly respected child psychiatrist from the University of Virginia who has spent time talking with and studying children who claim to remember past lives.
And even he noted there was something very special, and different, about Ryan.
Most remarkable to Dr. Tucker, besides Ryan's incredible detail, was how accurate his claims matched up with the life of Martin, a virtual unknown who neither Ryan's family nor Dr. Tucker knew anything about, even his name, until they reached out to a film archivist.
The film archivist gave them the name, and they then contacted one of Martin's daughters to ask about his life.
That is when they discovered that 55 of Ryan's statements matched up perfectly with Martin's life - including the street he lived on, how many children he had, how many siblings he had and those aforementioned five marriages.
The most shocking claim however came when Ryan told Dr. Tucker during a session one day that he wondered why God had him die at 61-years-old only to be reincarnated as a baby.
This seemed to clash with Martin's death report, that stated he was 59 at the time he died.
That is until Dr. Tucker looked through old census reports and discovered that the certificate, and not Ryan, was incorrect.
The certificate claimed Martin was born in 1905 when in fact he had been born in 1903 according to the census.
And so, Martin was likely 61 years old at the time of his death.
Ryan now says his memories of Martin are starting to fade, and as for Dr. Tucker, he has compiled Ryan's story and other like it in his book Return To Life.
when a soul is dipped into the "anti-memory solution" it sometimes doesn't completely cover the soul (perhaps the head and shoulders doesn't get dipped) and the soul goes on to remember it's PL in the next life. 
