Don't hold your breath.

A paradox has a purpose, to play word games with the human mind.

The Fermi Paradox is much like a God Paradox, except the existence of intelligent life somewhere is extremely plausible. Fermi's question: "Where's the evidence?" is applicable to silly notions of a God.

Yes, the Fermi Paradox is total BS.

BS sort of. In the April/May issue of a humanist mag. is an incredible editorial titled "Is Intelligence Toxic." it's fairly long but contains some realistic views on the presence (or, in this case absence) of alien life. Some previews "Earth’s 10–14 million species (86 percent of them undescribed) are estimated to constitute less than 0.3 percent of the billions that ever existed. Sanity check: Life dates back 3.5 billion years, but multi-celled life evolved much more recently, about 600 million years ago. If each multi-celled species were to split into two at the (conservative) rate of once every 10 million years with no extinctions, then earth would now be home to over 1018 species—a hundred billion times more than the estimate. Clearly, extinction has been a very grim reaper. If environmental changes afflict species faster than they can adapt, they vanish. But hey, we have unparalleled adaptability! We can live in any environment, even the vacuum of space. With our secret sauce we’ll surely beat the odds, right?"

"The Kepler space telescope’s data suggest as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbit Milky Way stars in their Goldilocks zones of habitability. Can you imagine if the Chicxulub asteroid had missed the Earth 65 million years ago and tyrannosaurs had evolved human-level intelligence 40 million years ago? I can’t. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Given billions of years and even more billions of habitable planets, intelligence has had ample opportunity to evolve many times. If any are like my hypothetical tyrannosaurs, their civilizations are already millions of years old. It’s plausible that in our galactic neighborhood at least one has engaged in interstellar engineering projects, say building Dyson spheres.[7] Such projects would inadvertently radiate non-random signatures that are detectable by our radio telescopes. Sadly, in over fifty years of trying, SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has observed nothing, nada, zilch, no signatures of intelligence."
The editorial gets into the problems on Earth, overpopulation and the effects of an 'intelligent' species on their planets life support system as well as the natural extinction rate of all life forms. In summary it postulates there most probably were higher life forms in our galaxy but that they have long since gone extinct as will we.

[secularhumanism.org]

It's infinitesmally more likely that pilots saw secret technology originating here on Earth. Most likely USA technology. The chance of these sightings being extraterrestrial are completely nil and Nelson never said they were.

I'd go with BS, quite the leap from some buggy sightings to making up a whole advanced civilization. I think we're a lot closer to the limits of engineering than most people think and interstellar travel will never be a paying venture.