I'm in agreement with several people here, especially
@Thomas R Morrison, that there are as yet no critically developed grounds for conflating 'para-normal' experiences occurring during ufo sightings, events, contacts, on one hand, with 'para-normal' experiences of the kinds exhaustively studied by psychical researchers and parapsychologists since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research established in the early 1880s in the UK. That some people claim to have had experiences of both types does not support the proposition that these experiences all have a single origin and significance emanating from a region of 'supernormal being' separate from the region and conditions of being that our species, along with other animal species, occupies in the local world we inhabit.
Our species' recorded history is filled with examples of what psychical researchers have called 'para-normal' experiences and capabilities, including extrasensory perception, precognition, postcognition, telepathy, remote viewing, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. It might be that people possessing varying degrees of these capabilities are more likely to be open to receiving and understanding information of various kinds available during sightings of ufos and interactions with beings met in encounters with landed ufos. But my impression is that a great many ufo and associated entity witnesses merely experience the shock of encountering radically unfamiliar things and beings in the world they think they are familiar with and understand.
Depending on their personal histories (of experiences and reflection on their experiences, and their resulting psychological mindsets), such witnesses might simply be mentally and emotionally overwhelmed or destabilized by their encounters and either grasp for prosaic explanations of what they are sensing or grasp at 'explanations' in terms of what they have seen represented in films, television programs, and memes widespread in their current popular culture. Neither response is adequate to the challenge of comprehending the nature of what is consciously experienced, whether in ufo encounters or in a multitude of other situations in which we can find ourselves experiencing 'reality' in marginal, multiple, and incoherent ways. What requires investigation in our time is the nature of consciousness itself. The currently developing interdisciplinary field of Consciousness Studies pursues this question from scientific, philosophical, and parapsychological perspectives, all of which are necessary approaches.
There are extensive research archives available to us from the 140 years of modern psychical and parapsychological investigations to date that should be consulted by anyone proposing a theory, or even a working hypothesis, that ufo phenomena can be accounted for as manifestations of a single category of experience we can naively label 'the paranormal'.
There is a new study of William James's investigations of psychic phenomena during the years 1880 to 1910 that might provide a good overview of the mindsets with which psychical researchers had to contend in developing that discipline. I'll post the title and link to the introduction of the book available at amazon. A fully searchable text is not yet available there.
Krister Dylan Knapp,
William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity, Hardcover – May 1, 2017
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XGZPW56/?tag=rockoids-20
Note: in the table of contents click on "Introduction: Tertium Quid"
