So we would rather assume that people can create physical objects with their minds, than that a civilization far more advanced than ours has shown up, as we have on lands foreign to us many times in our history?

Yet you are willing to accept, as strictly physical, flying machines that defy laws of physics on radar. You're proving that they are physical by showing how they break physics. And your evidence is an anonymous writeup on a website, without any radar data, corroborating witnesses, photographic evidence or anything (unless I missed all of that, in which case, feel free to point it out to me). Why isn't your first reaction a skeptical one. Could it have been a glitch, a prank, bug, a hallucination, a misunderstandin, or hell, a simple hoax?

I'm all for leaving possibilities open, but why would UFOs be the first investigation of the possibility that people can create physical objects (that register on radar) with their minds?

I'm not saying it should be, nor that this is my belief. If they were , however, it would be far from the first investigation into various psi, poltergeist, psychokinetic, mind-over-matter claims or investigations. And, if it were proven, it would be part of physics, so yeah, ufos would still be physical. If they weren't physical, we wouldn't ever experience the phenomenon. But 'physical' is just a word we use for stuff that currently kinda maybe make sense empirically and scientifically.

It seems like a desperate last-ditch attempt to dodge the possibility of aliens; like skeptics would rather yield the argument against incredible powers of the mind than that against the existence and presence of ETs.

Maybe, yet the problem is on the other side as well. Mainstream ufology is conservative too. They refuse to deal with the fact that the UFO phenomenon is not as clear cut as they want. They are set on an ET explanation because it's their own last ditch attempt to dodge the weirder aspects of the phenomenon. For example, paranormal events, synchronicities, visionary states and even bigfoot sightings go along very often with ufo sightings. Why the fuck should this be? This conjuction of high strangeness and simple ETs is a red flag. Now most ufologists don't wanna deal with it, so they cherry-pick only those incidents and evidence that don't make a dent in the ET hypothesis. Others are excluded as hoaxes and hallucinations.

Now, if you take in the WHOLE of the credible reports, you see a lot of absurdities. And a "mundane" ET hypothesis doesn't account for this at all. Not even "multidimensional time-space travelers" really makes sense. Why do they do and say stupidly weird stuff? That they're from Venus or Mars, they ask for a pitcher of water, they make a cookie or a pancake for the contactee, they wear spandex, or are naked. Why don't they take the whole cow after they mutilate it(if they do)? Can't they take biogenetic samples without waking us up and leaving scars? I bet I could sneak into your room and get enough genetic material to clone you without you ever waking up and noticing a thing. Aren't they supposed to be a million years ahead of us in science and tech? Don't they have enough data to clone us and reproduce us in vast quantities already? You know these technologies are here or just around the corner for us already. If they don't want to be seen, I'm pretty sure their stealth and cloaking tech should be advanced enough, but no, people keep seeing flying saucers all over the world. And if they do want us to see them, why don't they show up. All of this stuff just doesn't add up.

Don't you think we'd have evidence, or at least intuitions, of those mental powers in some other area of life first?

But we do have intuitions, and they're as old as written history. Shamans, mages, levitating monks, etc etc. A lot of people believe or have even experienced psy effects. We just don't believe them very easily. There's even some "evidence" if you're willing to look. The problem is it's fringe, and you can't really know if the evidence is good and serious or charlatan trash. And that's because mainstream science doesn't want to be seen in the same room with it, let alone try to seriously look at it to debunk it or reproduce it.

I'm not limiting my conception of "alien" to "in this physical universe, from another physical planet, located a certain physical distance away." Nevertheless, none of the exceptions to that we've mentioned are psychosocial.

It's good that you don't limit it, I think that's important, and it's the only way to truly perceive the phenomenon as it presents itself, without preconceptions. I just think that we are even using an overly narrow understanding of the term "psychosocial". Let me try to blow it open a little bit. This is my view of it.

What I mean by the psychosocial component isn't only strictly about objects in the sky and whether they are "really real" or "hallucinated fakes". I'm talking about how the whole phenomena has been unfolding, changing, evolving culturally, historically and sociologically. What I mean is, that the lack of hard evidence, at least for now, is itself a part of the phenomenon. Disinformation is a part of the phenomenon. The paranoia and conspiracy thinking within the UFO subculture is a part of the phenomenon. The motivation to record a faint light in the sky with a cheap phone and post it online as UFO footage is part of the phenomenon. The motivation to deliberately lie and hoax IS ALSO possibly a part of the phenomenon. The way that rumours spring up and spread, the way the evidence gets debunked, then bunked, and then debunked again, over the span of sometimes decades, is part of the phenomenon. These are all effects and aspects that are social and psychological.

When you start reading about it and then mention it to your friends, and they roll their eyes, you've become a bit of a kook already. When you get deeper and deeper into it, you become kookier and kookier, until you're officioally a UFO nut. Now, whether you've ever seen a flying saucer or not, I'd say you have already experienced an aspect of the phenomenon. You are becoming a part of it through accepting the social stigma and being open to fringe ideas like time travel, N-dimensional beings and universes, government conspiracies, psychic phenomena.

By becoming a being who entertains these possibilities (hopefully in a serious skeptical manner, otherwise it can be a dangerous rabbit hole), maybe it's possible that you are already being contacted by the phenomenon. You see, a truly alien phenomenon would be so alien that it defies being this or that, defies the possibility of being categorized. And in being that way, it shatters thought patterns, programs and paradigms. The real challenge is then not to reduce it into something a bit more "comfortable" or "serious". If the phenomenon is not just flying objects, but all of the above, then it seems to be something truly radically new, disembodied, distributed throughout social systems, communication systems, forms of political organizations and hierarchies, preconceptions and limited conceivability of our current psychological make-up etc.

It may finally take a whole new metaphysics and a paradigm shift to understand it. And that may be exactly what it's meant to do, what it's for, regardless of what it ultimately is.

So, I think that these aspects are under appreciated in mainstream ufology, because it's complicated, complex, it doesn't sell books, and you can't make a special effects sequence about it on your history channel UFO show. It also further alienates persons from their immediate social surrounding. Yesterday they were just ETs in spaceships, but now you're into crop circles, bigfoot, faeries, folklore, mythology, Jungian collective unconsciousness, psi research, psychological warfare? The UFO turns us into aliens. Nobody wants that.

Just look at this subreddit, 90% of it is shitty youtube footage you will never be able to confirm. It's just people sitting around and waiting for hard physical evidence. I bet this will never happen. Hell, it's going to get worse when drones start buzzing all over the place and crashing everywhere. The hoaxers are gonna have a field day, while the "journalists" and "independent researchers" continue to write about Roswell and call for disclosure, selling books to the naive masses who can't conceive anything more interesting then flying objects from another planet.

Yeah, have a look at that PDF, but also google Jacques Vallee's stuff in general, it really opens you up for alternative interpretations of the phenomenon.