Synthesis of the extraterrestrial vs inter-dimensional issue?

Everything is speculation, but maybe there isn’t a distinction between these two things. Perhaps advanced life elsewhere in the universe has managed to hack into our environment and the way to do it involves accessing higher dimensions. Sort of like remote viewing but including physical or holographic projections of physical bodies.

If there’s any truth to the stories about these beings collecting bio data on us, that would suggest to me that they themselves are physically somewhere else, and are doing so to augment their own scientific knowledge of the same universe we are in.