Jeff Rense

Jeff Rense (Jeffry Shearer Rense) is an American internet and talk-radio host based in Ashland, Oregon, best known for the long-running program that became the Jeff Rense Program and for the website Rense.com. Critics place his birth in 1945 or 1946; an Oregon marriage license gives 30 January 1946. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he first worked on air in the 1970s.

Radio career

In 1994 Rense self-financed a show on Santa Barbara's KTMS, originally titled Sightings on the Radio, a deliberate reference to the television series Sightings. Its early distribution ran through Premiere Radio Networks, which dropped it in the late 1990s after it was deemed hate speech and banned in Europe, according to Wikipedia's summary. Talk Radio Network carried it in the early 2000s under the Jeff Rense Program title, and Genesis Communications Network carried it until August 2009, when Rense accused fellow host Alex Jones of threatening to "destroy" him. The show now streams from Rense.com. Oregon corporate records show the business entities behind it, including Sightings.com LLC (2000) and Rense.com (2004), all now listed as inactive, per the Southern Poverty Law Center.

UFO and abduction content

For much of its history the program was a major outlet for ufology. Its coverage included what the SPLC describes as "government-sponsored space alien abduction reports" and "Post Abduction Syndrome" claims, and it featured remote viewers who said they had located underground UFO bases. The SPLC compared an archived 2000 page, with nine references to "UFO," to an April 2015 front page with eight uses of "alien," suggesting the site's emphasis moved over time. Other material includes 9/11 conspiracy theories, chemtrails, and alternative medicine, which is where much of the commercial activity sits.

Rense's ufology is significant less for any new evidence than for the audience it reached. A conspiracy-oriented talk show with a national syndicate was one of the main ways late-twentieth-century abduction stories and government cover-up claims circulated beyond magazines and conferences. Researchers who documented these claims generally treated the program as a source of testimony rather than corroboration.

Antisemitism controversy

The program's standing changed sharply after the Anti-Defamation League's 17 March 2009 report, Rense Web Site Promotes Anti-Semitic View. The ADL described Rense.com as virulently antisemitic and said the radio show promoted a range of conspiracy theories, often centred on extraterrestrials, with antisemitism voiced by both guests and Rense himself. It also cited antisemitic images by the artist David Dees, some denying the Holocaust.

In April 2015 the SPLC published "New Report on Jeff Rense and His Rense Radio Network" and a follow-up, "Used Canard Salesman." The SPLC reported that Rense.com marked Adolf Hitler's birthday, counted 21 mentions of Hitler on the front page, and that the network carried shows hosted by David Duke and Don Black. It also documented alternative-health products sold through his companies, including a $2,695 "Rife" frequency generator and a fly-trap extract for which the FDA had issued an import alert. The SPLC also said that Rense declined interview requests and that the site's audience had fallen sharply.

Current status and assessment

Rense continues to publish and stream his program through his own website. The SPLC and ADL reports remain the most detailed independent accounts of his output, and Wikipedia notes that its own article relies largely on a single source. Neither the ADL nor the SPLC describes him as a researcher in the sense used by most UFO investigators, and no source reviewed for this entry records a substantive response from Rense to the 2009 and 2015 allegations.

For a reader of UFO history he is a useful case study of how alien and government-cover-up narratives were packaged for mass audiences, and of how those audiences overlapped with openly antisemitic material. His UFO claims are best treated as the claims of a broadcaster rather than as investigative findings, and his antisemitism allegations are documented by the advocacy organisations that made them rather than by any court or independent investigation.