I seem to recall from one of my classes in college that there is (on the conservsative side) a 6% chance that life exists somewhere in this galaxy right now (obviously, we do). I'm too lazy to look up the entire mathematical equation right now, but it involved many statistics about the most necessary features for life on a planet. Now, if there is a 6% chance that life exists in this galaxy right now, it should basically be the same for all other galaxys. Unless there is something about galaxies I don't know. All of those 6% chances combine together to make a chance that is pretty much 100% that there is life elsewhere in the universe.
As for contacting them from god knows how many light years away... yeah, no. Not in the forseeable future, unless we get a huge breakthrough in tech. It makes me sad, I wish I could know what else is out there.
And there is a lot of shitty, shitty science that people use to justify UFO sightings and encounters. The burden of proof is on the sighters, and no one has been able to prove it even slightly convincingly to me.