UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

As one great search for alien life comes to a fiery end on the edge of Saturn, another one is about to begin in Australia.

American UFO hunter James Fox is offering $100,000 to anyone who can give him credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth — including from a claimed sighting in suburban Melbourne he is investigating.

The proposal is perhaps not as crazy as it seems. It comes in the same week that the NASA spacecraft Cassini ends its groundbreaking 20-year mission that recently discovered the Saturnal moon Enceladus had an ocean and potential hydrothermal activity — key building blocks for life.

However, Fox’s quest is at the opposite end of the journey: Any alien life that made it to Earth. And that quest has now come to Australia.

In particular, he is appealing to government officials who might have documentary or photographic evidence but might be fearful of going public because of either the stigma or official repercussions.

“We’re trying to get government officials to come forward and not say ‘Hey, ET has landed’ but there have been events (witnessed) by extremely credible observers of relatively incredible things and we have yet to explain or be able to explain these and to sort of acknowledge some of these incredible events in an official capacity,” he tells News.com.au.

“Coupling along with that, we know through interviews with some of the military men and women we met with, that there are bits of evidence, whether it be radar or some photographs of landing gear, that sort of thing, that have never seen the light of day. And we are encouraging any military or government officials with some of these materials a rather large sum of money — $100,000 and possibly more — if they are willing to come forward.”

Very few of the tips Fox has received make the cut even for analysis.

“We’ve got lots of compelling photographs but nothing where our jaw hit the floor.”

At the moment, Fox says a physicist is currently examining some “physical evidence” — an object found in New Mexico — to see if it might have come from an alien spacecraft. If it is found to be unearthly that could be the first to qualify for the reward.

He is offering complete anonymity and even encourages people to contact him via tradition mail lest electronic communications get intercepted.

But while the documentary maker admits this all sounds very paranoid, he insists he is no tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. He has no truck with people who got drunk and then woke-up claiming they’d been beamed up for a probing.

Instead, Fox says there are serious questions about classified material the US military is refusing to release. And he says Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta has spoken to him on the record for his upcoming film, voicing frustration that the military refused to fully declassify potential UFO material under Bill Clinton’s administration. He also says that Hillary Clinton was planning to revisit the issue if she had become president.

“He (Podesta) basically said that he was acutely aware of the stigma associated with the phenomenon but he felt that someone in his position needs to come forward and participate to encourage others to do so. And that President Clinton had made efforts and he had many discussions with Hillary and that Hillary was planning on doing another effort of releasing classified documents.”

“He said that the phenomena cannot be explained away … (not) all of it. That it merits further investigation and that other people should take it more seriously.”

Fox says he cannot reveal his financial backers due to obvious sensitivities but that they include two extremely high-profile American public figures and philanthropists.

Fox first made the $100,000 offer among UFO circles during a conference in 2013 but none of the material submitted has yet satisfied him. Now he is publicly announcing the reward to the world ahead of a speaking tour of Australia that kicks off this weekend.

The significance of this is that he will be interviewing people who claim to have witnessed one or more flying saucers in the Melbourne suburb of Westall in 1966.

The infamous “sighting” by some 200 students and teachers at Westall High School was reported in both The Age and The Dandenong Journal and remains a mystery to this day.

The Age report suggested it might have been a weather balloon while others have suggested it may have been an experimental military aircraft.

Fox says that anyone who has credible evidence, such as a rumored photograph of the craft, would be eligible for the $100,000 if that evidence proved to be authentic.

“It would have to be coupled with a piece of pretty substantial evidence. If there was a photograph of the object on the ground, a photograph of the object in the air, if there was a government document, irrefutable, confirming that, that would certainly be considered something that was bona fide,” he says.

“We’re talking to a gentleman now, I can’t say any names, but apparently there was someone who did take a photograph of something very similar to that a day or two prior to the landing so we’re going to meet with him.”

Meanwhile, in the outer reaches of the solar system, a more conventional and expensive search for alien life is drawing to a close.

The extraordinary $3 billion-plus Cassini mission will end on Friday when the spacecraft self-immolates by plunging into Saturn. Having discovered the potential for life, its controllers at NASA and the European and Italian space agencies must now destroy it rather than risk contaminating the very worlds it unlocked with its own alien composition.

And so if someone like James Fox ever evolves on the oceanic moon of Enceladus to search for evidence of UFOs he will be sorely disappointed.

Nobody ever said the universe was fair.

In his 1952 short story, “The Martian Way,” science fiction legend Isaac Asimov imagined a future where settlers of the red planet, cut off from Earth’s water supply by an oppressive government, travel to the rings of Saturn to get their hands on precious ice.

As with any sci-fi written more than six decades ago, there are plenty of details we now know are inaccurate, and for a long time it looked like Asimov had erred when his settlers considered all their watery options. Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is described in the story as “a two-hundred-mile-diameter asteroid that’s hardly more than a chunk of ice,” very different from the arid space rock astronomers long took it to be.

Now, thanks to the latest round of results from NASA’s Dawn mission, we have learned Asimov was right about Vesta all along. As researchers at the University of Southern California write in Tuesday’s Nature Communications, the probe discovered unusually large smooth regions on the otherwise craggy asteroids. The researchers linked these with higher hydrogen concentrations, which in turn strongly suggest the presence of ground ice on Vesta.

“It was believed to be a dry body,” NASA researcher Essam Heggy, Ph.D. tells Inverse, saying previous evidence for water on Vesta had, at best, been ambiguous. Dawn’s findings erase those ambiguities. It’s just the latest of many findings in recent years showing that water and ice are damn near everywhere in the solar system, adding Vesta to a list that already includes Mars, the moons Europa and Enceladus, and its fellow asteroid Ceres.

“The more we search, the more we find ice and water in the solar system,” says Heggy, “and the more we realize water is not unique to our planet.”

The extent of Vesta's smooth, possibly hydrogen-rich areas

The presence of ice in the asteroid belt is especially intriguing, as collisions between asteroids can knock them out of their orbits and send them hurtling elsewhere in the solar system. Heggy says comets are already known to be a major transporter of water molecules through the solar systems. Asteroids might well have also played a role in distributing water, though he says it’s too early to speculate on what role they might have played in shaping Earth’s supply of water in the primordial solar system.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft visited Vesta in 2011-12, and it has since moved on to Ceres. Even half a decade later, researchers are able to pull new observations from the Dawn data that would be impossible to replicate here on Earth.

“There are Earth-based radar observations of the asteroid system, but the Dawn spacecraft was able to explore the roughness on the surface of Vesta at much better resolution than we could do from the Earth,” says Heggy. “And that’s how we were able to distinguish the presence of large, smooth areas on the surface of Vesta.”

Beyond hinting at the presence of water on yet another body in the solar system, having this more precise understanding of Vesta’s surface means it’s even more possible for NASA to plan out a potential future landing on the asteroid. There might not be the same need for water that drove the explorers of “The Martian Way” to consider a trip to the icy asteroid, but this latest data suggests Vesta is very much worth seeing up close.

If you liked this article, check out this video on light pollution in space.