American author and independent scholar of Egypt, a follower of the Symbolist reading of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and the author of Serpent in the Sky (1979). He is the man who started the Sphinx redating, and the wiki had carried Robert Schoch without him.
How it began
Schwaller had remarked in passing that the weathering on the Great Sphinx looked like the work of water. West took the observation seriously, could not test it himself, and went looking for a geologist willing to look at the rock without knowing what conclusion was wanted. Robert Schoch agreed, went to Giza, and reached the rainfall reading; the two presented it at the Geological Society of America in October 1991 and debated it at the AAAS in Chicago in February 1992 against Mark Lehner and K. Lal Gauri.
What he was and was not
Not a geologist, not a credentialled Egyptologist, and explicit about both. He was the person who noticed that a testable question was sitting inside an untestable tradition and who found someone qualified to test it, which is a real contribution and is separable from the Symbolist framework he brought to everything else. The 1993 NBC special The Mystery of the Sphinx, directed by Bill Cote and narrated by Charlton Heston, is why the argument reached a mass audience at all; West was one of its writers and took the News and Documentary Emmy for research in 1994.
Connections
Robert Schoch · Great Sphinx · Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis · Origins of the Sphinx · Mark Lehner · Graham Hancock · Fingerprints of the Gods · Robert Bauval · Frank Domingo · Edgar Cayce