Don, you "can't divulge in a public forum"? That is a red flag waved by charlatans, as I am sure you know. You lost a LOT of credibility there.

Bill, your news about your wife's health is devastating.
Like you, she is a special person and I love you both.

But on to my eccentricities:
Let me throw something really bizarre into this too, too erudite discussion.
What if the 'aliens' are amongst us - but are not from outer space or .... What if they are here but in our oceans or in our mountains/earth?
My benefides: At about 6:00 on a September morning I was almost at my home in the country. As I topped the hill, just before the road drops into the valley, I came to a stop because some thing somewhat torpedo- shaped traveled through the air not much higher than my car in front of me and as I watched, it rose to clear the tree tops to my right. There was what appeared to be colored flame inside the frame. I no longer remember the colors but I do remember white and blue.
I heard no sound; on the other hand my window was shut.
Bemused, I went on home barely another mile away. I decided that probably someone in the neighborhood had built something that he or she could set off and had chosen the early morning hour to avoid detection .
But then a few weeks later I met my brother at my parents' place a half mile or so from mine and I told him what I had seen. He looked at me funny and said that he and Dad were out mending fence the summer before when the same thing that I described went past them and straight into the front of the heavily wooded and steep loaf of mountain across the road from our dad's place. He said it didn't 'crash' into the mountain but that it seemed to just enter it.