The next 5-10 years we will have some form of confirmation. This slow build-up the last few years points to that pretty much and now people in high ranking positions coming out publicly slowly confirming what they know is another tell. I still think it is not physical beings but instead machines though, from where? nobody knows yet because the technology is not understood. Mathematics is a universal language though and it will be understood as our technology evolves. Look how far we have come in a little over 100 years alone from the first flight that the people of the time thought would be impossible to flying a drone on Mars.
The logical reasoning in me points to something like this:
Flying objects observed directly by world militaries for decades, reports jotted down and archived in classified folders by their respective governments because national security and all that bs.
Fast forward to the present and it's too difficult to keep such things under wraps, previous diversion tactics aren't working any more (there's only so much swamp gas that can go round...) what with modern means to communicate and information leakages so these documents are being unclassified and the public are slowly being drip fed so it all starts to sink in that we are not alone in terms of intelligence, whether biological or machine based doesn't matter.
It helps greatly that rather than the media/news talking about it as satire, it is now being taken very seriously and well respected outfits like 60 minutes are pushing that along nicely. More and more people understand the science of space now too (as far as we know anyway) and readily available factual info is at our fingertips in real-time which has never been possible up until more recently.
I give it 10 years max which coincides not far off from our own technological singularity if I remember right.
