Personally, I find the HoME books interesting but not necessarily a good guide to what Tolkien's final thoughts in all matters might be, but there is a passage in "The Treason of Isengard" that has been influential in my thinking on this matter:
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In the first draft Gimli asks, 'That old man. You say Saruman is abroad. Was it you or Saruman that we saw last night?' and Gandalf replies: 'If you saw an old man last night, you certainly did not see me. But as we seem to look so much alike that you wished to make an incurable dent in my hat, I must guess that you saw Saruman [or a vision>] or some wraith of his making. [Struck out: I did not know that he lingered here so long.]' Against Gandalf's words my father wrote in the margin: Vision of Gandalf's thought. There is clearly an important clue here to the curious ambiguity surrounding the apparition of the night before, if one knew how to interpret it; but these words are not perfectly clear. They obviously represent a new thought: arising perhaps from Gandalf's suggestion that if it was not Saruman himself that they saw it was a 'vision' or 'wraith' that he had made, the apparition is now to emanate from Gandalf himself. But of whom was it a vision? Was it an embodied 'emanation' of Gandalf, proceeding from Gandalf himself, that they saw? 'I look into his unhappy mind and I see his doubt and fear,' Gandalf has said; it seems more likely perhaps that through his deep concentration on Saruman he had 'projected' an image of Saruman which the three companions could momentarily see. I have found no other evidence to cast light on this most curious element in the tale; but it may be noted that in a time-scheme deriving from the time of the writing of 'Helm's Deep' and 'The Road to Isengard' my father noted of that night: 'Aragorn and his companions spend night on battle-field, and see "old man" (Saruman).'
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This does not answer the question for certain, of course, since it is Christopher's speculation concerning his father's intention, but the concept of the person seen at the fire being a "vision" created by thought was JRRT's, not his. In my own thought, if this was indeed a "projected" image and not a real person, and if it is indeed of Saruman rather than Gandalf (which, be it physical or illusory, JRRT seemed most inclined to identify it as Saruman; it shows up repeatedly in notes and drafts), it feels more logical (to my mind at least) for it to originate from Saruman rather than Gandalf. This may be because Saruman demonstrated both keen interest and impatience in leaving Orthanc to gather news, or perhaps because he has a palantir at his disposal. But the notion of the old man being non-physical does have some substantiation, however minimal.