John Anthony West


John Anthony West was an American author, lecturer, guide and a proponent of the fringe Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. His early career was as a copywriter in Manhattan and as a science fiction writer. He received a Hugo Award Honorable Mention in 1962.
In 1993, his controversial work with geologist Robert M. Schoch was presented by Charlton Heston in an NBC special called The Mystery of the Sphinx. This won West a News & Documentary Emmy Award for Best Research and a nomination for Best Documentary. The documentary contends that the main type of weathering evident on the Great Sphinx and surrounding enclosure walls could only have been caused by prolonged and extensive rainfall during the time period from 10,000 to 5000 BCE and was carved out of limestone bedrock by an ancient advanced culture. This challenged the conventional dating of the carving of the statue circa 2500 BCE. West suggested that the Sphinx may be more than twice as old as originally determined, estimating it be from 35000 BCE, some 37,000 years ago whereas Schoch made a more conservative determination of between 5000 and 7000 BCE.
West died from cancer at the age of 85 on February 6, 2018.

Criticism

of the University of Texas at Austin has been critical of West. In a 1979 exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books, Green drew attention to what he considered to be numerous problems with West's work, including unconscious prejudices, "wildly speculative" ideas and lack of scientific evidence, as well as a tendency towards conspiracy theories in respect of orthodox Egyptology.

Works

West's writing career spanned two periods. The first half lasted from 1961 to 1980 as a science fiction short story writer; and the second half was from 1980 to 2007 as a non-fiction book author. He won an Honorable Mention for Best Short Fiction towards the 1962 Hugo Award for his early short story "The Fiesta at Managuay".

Science fiction

Call Out the Malicia is West's first published book and is a collection of his short stories.
;Fiction
;Non-fiction