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.