It does not surprise me that the aliens are telepathic in nature. Our science, the main stream one doesn't allow it, because they cannot prove the theory. We simply don't have them walking among us. None that we know about, but if you look into the incident reports, especially the third kind, with close encounters the one thing that is consistent is telepathy.
In Quin's case it is plausible that he didn't just imagine it happening, but actually they contact him, convincing him of their presence unlike the man in the real life. But that's the thing, they do contact us, and possibly have been doing so for a very, very long time. In our myths, we have embaths, seers or clairvoyants, and we have telepaths. That isn't just coming out from the writers imagination.
But that's the thing, we cannot prove it. Nobody can without alien presence or someone super rare presents the case as the real thing. For Quin's sake, it's too bad that he remembers removing the mask, therefore making the hypoxia claim true, unless the visitors somehow did stop the time, and then returned him safety back in the reality.
That however then leads to the time-travel and eventually to the multi-verse, which I hoped we are not venturing into at this moment. The Project Blue Book is already enough of weird on its own. There is however the telepathy connection and allegedly the EBE-1 and EBE-2 that went to Los Alamos and to Nellis AFB destined to end of in the S-4 as part of the Area 51.
I know it's a tall a claim, but it would also explain the whole crash case. The US military confiscated the evidence, and hid it in the desert, and among them were the pilots. In the official version all of them were dead, but the unofficial one speaks about the some of the Extraterrestrial Biological Entities being real. The conspiracy theories and government coverup however makes the whole thing so difficult to prove, because all the material that has been recovered has been redacted, and proven to be hoaxes.
What we know to be true are the metal pieces and I-beams marked with the hieroglyphs. The official story confirms them. People, farmer friends founds them and years later, some of them were recovered and then lost again. If you add there Colonel Corso's story about the other recoveries, you can start to formulate a picture that the whole coverup went mental and world believed it, because the Pentagon could not lie. After all they had won the war so why would they lie?
Maybe they thought that they could cover it, and the world would continue believing that we are alone, when the fact was that we'd been visited for a long time. Maybe for millions of years and among them has been truly celestial figures that has ended up as deities in our religions. And it frighten them so much so that they ordered these intelligence projects to study the phenomenon.
Today we are in the point, where we know that we are studying a phenomenon and the Pentagon isn't trying to absolutely silence it. Instead they've prepared and the president has set a leadership for the Space Forces, making the conflict in the near space a real possibility. The official story is the defence against the Russia and China, while the unofficial version speaks about the real chance of alien encounters.
Corso also spoke about the telepathic creatures, and how they had communicated or got into the soldiers heads. So, for sake us of, it's safety assume that they are psionic, and have advanced capabilities compared to us. But what will happen is Hynek and Quinn goes are recovers the body?
Harding might be able to silence the crash in town, but he could not take away the corpse.