Just out of curiosity, when you experienced sleep paralysis, did you see any beings?
Not once I startled up out of REM sleep into the partial-waking paralysis stage. But the startling up phase was often accompanied by feelings of fear occasioned by denizens of my dreams.
Let me be clear about one thing. I am, and have been since I was a small child, a rather rational person. When I was about five years old, I deduced that Santa Claus couldn't exist because of the travel speed and sleigh weight problems, and also because reindeer can't fly! Seeking evidence for the correctness of my deductions, I looked for, and found, the Christmas presents that purported to be from Santa Claus hidden on the top shelf of my parents' closet. My younger sister still gets (laughingly) angry when she recalls how I disabused her of the concept of Santa Claus before she would have lost her belief on her own.
All this by way of saying that I've never (to my recollection) felt that animate beings (invisible, alien, whatever) were in my immediate surroundings harboring either benign or malignant intentions. I've never had a sense that there's a 'presence' in the room with me or, more generally, guiding me along my life's way.
Perhaps I'm just an unimaginative rationalist. But if 'unimaginative' means 'not given to entertaining or believing in fictive entities or processes', I don't find that a bad thing. And as for 'rationalist', the critic of my rationalism must use reason to criticize it or else pay the penalty of not being understood!
You sound as though you have a very rational position. Show me some evidence before I believe something. I agree very much with that attitude, but I have to admit I'm inclined to think something is there for two reasons, the universe is pretty big, and I can't agree that every single sightinh is a mistake.
But for every nutbar, there's a Randi or Condon type who will stretch imagination and believability to the extreme to prove these things don't exist.
Okay, it's late and there are few people to read this ephemera anyway, ahem, but here's what happened to me during my episode.
I "went downstairs" and tried to get the attention of my kids, who were playing a video game, and they, of course, ignored their discorporate father. I went somewhere else where I was gently, but firmly taken in hand by a guy who took me "back to my body," and that was the end of it.
Kids, I found out later, were playing a videogame at the time.
No aliens, don't know what the Hell was going on, but I have never been quite so comfortable with my understanding of what is and what isn't since :-)
Rational explanation: mind was freaking out because something odd, but physiologically explainable was happening, so it began to frantically try to make sense of the experience. Kids playing a videogame isn't a bad guess, so my "dream" happened to correspond with reality. When the "natural" dream didn't help, I "dreamed" something more exotic to allow my consciousness to handle things. If I was into aliens, it might have been an alien; and it might have looked just like everyone knows aliens look, since we've seen them a million times in popular media. Since I wasn't, my encounter was a more generic, not quite an angel, but defiinitely a purposeful authority figure of some sort.
Do I believe that explanation?