I think you might have your 'skeptometer' set too high, ufology. Being reactive to 'religion' (a rather baggy umbrella category including widely diverging phenomena) doesn't or shouldn't, imo, require rejecting all of the contributions of Eastern philosophy and thought to human epistemology and ontology. What scientists and philosophers mean by 'Physicalism' likewise constitutes a spectrum of ideas in our time, many of them diverging on significant points, so that we need to identify what each of us means when we use that term.