If the CIA was so convinved that remote viewing was real why did they stop trying to use it?
Allow me to answer that question by posing another: Have you ever heard of Robert Bigelow?
He's sort of like the Sir Richard Branson of the paranormal; an independently wealthy hotelier who has millions of dollars of disposable capital and chooses to spend vast amounts of it pursuing his personally hobby of "studying UFOs". To that end, Bigelow created an organization called the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose job was to investigate paranormal claims Scientifically™. Most notably, NIDS actually bought and spent several years from the 90's through the early 2000's studying alleged paranormal phenomena at a
haunted ranch in Utah (this may ring a few bells), only to be forced to conclude at the end of it that the ranch was
definitely haunted by something intelligent, but whatever it was utterly refused to cooperate with and/or purposely sabotaged all efforts to collect scientifically-rigorous evidence about its existence. Heh.
That last bit isn't just a throwaway, by the way. Bigelow and the former board of NIDS are largely convinced that UFOs exist, but they don't believe they are spaceships with aliens in them. Rather, Bigelow believes that there exists some number of extra-dimensional (rather than extra-terrestrial) intelligences of an uncertain nature, and that these intelligences are able to enter our world and just really enjoy psychologically tormenting humans for unknown reasons - perhaps for entertainment. According to their theory, these entities cruelly toy with humans by "creating" not only UFOs for us to see, but also ghost and poltergeist phenomena, demonic possessions, cattle mutilations, and bigfoots and other monsters that people occasionally report seeing - none of which (says the theory) have any independent reality, all being illusions, hallucinations, or simulations controlled by the sadistic extra-dimensionals (if this theory sounds suspiciously like the old Ray Palmer "deros" story to anyone else, I'm right there with you). I think I've read that Bigelow may have actually reached this conclusion some time before the Utah ranch study and that the purpose of NIDS all along was mainly to prove it; however, he certainly believed it by the end of that debacle. But anyway, I digress.
In 2007, Bigelow convinced one of his close friends, Dem senator Harry Reid of Nevada, to pressure the Pentagon to create a secret new program for studying UFO sightings - and it worked;
the program ran for five years until Pentagon leadership finally cancelled it in 2012. In case you're concerned that actual military resources were spent on this, don't worry: the DoD actually paid a civilian contractor $22 million of the taxpayers' money to carry out this UFO study. That civilian contractor was (in case you're curious) of course Bigelow Aerospace, which is owned by Robert Bigelow, whose friend Harry Reid pressed for the creation of the program in the first place.
Smooth. Oh, and remember that digression above? Well Bigelow Aerospace spent some of that $22 million in UFO-research money
studying things that weren't UFO's - namely ghosts and bigfoot - ontologically justified by the fact that according to Bigelow all these things are really the same thing.
So what does all this have to do with your question about the CIA cancelling their psychic study? Well, the Bigelow-Pentagon UFO study program WAS eventually cancelled, just like the CIA's program. But why? It would be tempting to assume, as some definitely did, that the study never found any hard evidence of anything (because, well, that's true - it didn't) and this convinced the Pentagon that it was a waste of time and money to continue the program; but that's not actually how it went down. We get a little detail from an interview published in late 2017 of Senator Reid by George Knapp, a reporter from Vegas TV station KLAS. Bear in mind here, Knapp wasn't interviewing Reid from the standpoint of a neutral journalist; he's a longtime friend of Bigelow's and in fact is the guy who first introduced Reid to Bigelow's work.
The important segment of the interview:
In an interview with Reid, Knapp says that he heard from Pentagon officials that the UFO program was canceled in part due to “fear based on religious beliefs of those who felt UFOs might be satanic.” Knapp then asked Reid if that was true:
KNAPP: Did you ever hear that? Opposition that maybe this is something evil?
REID: Yes. I think that there’s a lot of people who didn’t like it for a number of reasons and religious—not affiliation—religious views of people, it didn’t fit what they wanted to spend money on.
That's a little cryptic; but Knapp fleshed it out a bit more with a
tweet he posted last September, in which he says
The AATIP/BAASS study was sabotaged then defunded in large part because a cabal of religious fundamentalists inside the national security apparatus believes UFOs and paranormal are satanic and by studying them, we risk inviting Satan into our world.
So there you have it. It really would likewise be comforting to believe that the CIA's psychic study was cancelled because the agency eventually realized psychic powers don't exist and therefore the whole endeavor was pointless; but given the fate of the DoD's recent UFO program, I think we have to at least entertain the possibility that the CIA only stopped studying "remote viewing" because some fundy who had just been promoted into a policy-making position in the organization's leadership decided that psychic powers was "messing with devil-stuff".
