My initial "Can't Locate" problem was finger problems on my part ... I had mixed upper and lower case instances of "moodle" and "Moodle" -- once I stopped that, the upgraded version could in fact be located.
Regarding the UTF8 thing, wall as I understand it, I'm officially confused!
After a number of days of getting the "can't upgrade because it needs to be UTF8" message (followed by checking everywhere and finding every indication that I actually AM UTF8), today when I logged on, the UTF8 message was gone and I was able to upgrade without issue.
The system is not running 1.9.14 and (after a few checks of various parts of the site) seems to be running well.
So, the great news is that whatever wasn't working before is now working. The bad news is that I have no idea what changed to make the upgrade work, but ... at least it's working.
Thanks again for your help ... your input certainly left me more wise about things Moodle and I appreciate it. I'm just sorry that I took so much of your time over my inability to remain consistent with "M" or "m".
Arlo