Ya, I'm no expert and I've been way wrong before but I don't think we'll meet ET or find any wierd animals anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised if we find some sort of evidence of ET single celled organisms or "chemical" selection/evolutionary processes in our own solar system but we won't get past the heliosphere for decades or centuries and the ET's we want to meet would have to have lifespans in the hundreds of thousands of years per individual to get close enough for us to notice them.