From Groundwater Grift to Comet Claptrap: Allen Whitt and 20 Years of Cosmic Confusion

Mark Boslough is a Research Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. For a short biography, see the first link below.

The 2006 new-age book, “Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes,” introduced what is now called the Younger Dryas impact Hypothesis (often abbreviated as “YDIH”). The lead author was Richard Firestone, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who had dabbled in alternative archaeology and speculations about cosmic catastrophes caused by supernovas and interstellar comets. Allen West, the second author, was entirely unknown, and there is no record of his existence before 2006. He wrote most of the book in the first person. The third author, Simon Warwick-Smith, appears to have been West’s publicist, whose main contribution was to spice up his prose. The 2nd printing of the book came out on June 5, 2006, and included better graphics and some other changes, including the addition of “PhD” to West’s name.

Last month, as the 20th anniversary of this book approached, I spent some time trying to learn more about West’s background and qualifications. What led him to the prominent leadership role as sample collector and preparer, protocol developer, drafter of data graphs, interpreter of virtually all the evidence on which the YDIH is based, and corresponding author on many of their papers? How did he emerge, seemingly from nowhere, to become the primary founder and director of the Comet Research Group, which describes itself as a group of more than 63 scientists from more than 55 universities in more than 26 countries? How did he form a collaboration with biblical literalists and publish their most widely reported (but now retracted) Sodom comet paper?

I had already learned that West had changed his name from Allen Whitt in 2006 after being convicted in California of a crime associated with fraudulent groundwater survey reports in 1998, but I was never able to lay my hands on his sham reports to see for myself what was wrong with them. Last month, I ran across a USGS report that cited two previous groundwater reports that he had written in 1997, and I was able to check them out from the library of the state engineer in New Mexico.

I’ve also found public records with Allen Whitt’s name associated with earlier lawsuits involving new age businesses, which might shed some light on how he made the transition from purveyor of Sedona woo, to groundwater grifter, to the most prominent and visible member of a group of scientists that claims to have overturned paradigms in multiple established fields, including geology, archaeology, planetary science, impact physics, and paleontology.

I have started a blog series in which I will describe the trail of documents he has published, including the groundwater reports, his new age book, and his peer-reviewed papers. The first installment is here.

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