I may have a answer on why the remote viewing military unit was disbanded after the freedom of information released. This is a common practice in the world of Special Operations most Black Operations projects or units after being found out disband their unit and reorganize under a new name so in Government records and in budgeting the unit didnt exist anymore.
It was closed because it was given to the CIA, which had just had a significant budget and personnel cut. The project was funded with personnel slots for another year. They took it and shut it down as fast as possible and took the budget and slots for their people.
The CIA was given the project but they didn't want it; they took it because of the pre-approved funding attached.
They were offered the project because they had actually tried to get it repeatedly for years and were the biggest repeat customer in the program.
The reason they didn't want it anymore was because a massive change happened in the program in the mid 1980s. Tasking increased exponentially from late 1970s every month until then, which one is forced to assume is based on results since those taskings had to be paid for (funding was from a huge variety of military, intelligence, and corporations). The effects and results after the mid-80s were so bad that as author Jim Schnabel reported in his book, by the late 80s the viewers then in the unit didn't have hardly any work and were busy with indian beading, computer programming, one (morehouse) had a housecleaning business on the side.
The reason they had nothing to do was because once the results were seen, a good deal of the intell viewing shifted to the viewers who were in the science lab. Which happened to include the guy who'd been doing it when the big change happened; he left the unit and went to the lab.
So, in short, the program closed for the unit's incompetence. The science lab was not initially closed; that did not happen until a short time later and for other (political and disinformation) reasons.
This should not be seen as any statement on remote viewing as a subject; had it not had something worth showing, it wouldn't have gotten an entire unit and years of constantly growing paid tasking in the first place. It is a statement on bad management, and on what happens when you surgically remove the 'science protocol' from the 'psychic art' -- remote viewing is a combination of the two.
Of course this does result in the situation where the people in the DIA unit are in the situation of having appeared to contributed to the demise of their project. The realization that these people are in public as the experts and authorities on the topic makes you go "Hmmmn."
The CIA or DIA could have stopped their communicating about a lot of this with a single signature. Curiously that never happened, and despite several high-level reportings of Ed Dames for stuff that probably should have put him in Leavenworth, he was never investigated; he and Morehouse were in a "strategic deception" unit when they left the military; Ed was promoted to Major and released.
He went into the world very very loudly talking about something he called 'remote viewing' which has a bare resemblance to it -- a lot of resemblance with an experimental psychic method (an experiment which was canceled for lack of evidence of its value, circa 1986), but zero resemblance to the protocol which is the single thing that took psi out of the mystical wishful woo-woo and often fraudulent cultural muck it's been relegated to since the dawn of time, and cleaned it off and made it able to be studied and applied cleanly. Pretty much everything he (and to a lesser degree but similar manner, his coworkers of that era) have advertised since 1995 has turned out to be more a matter of disinformation than anything.
Remote Viewing is free-response psychic functioning as performed within a legitimate RV science protocol. Art+Science. One without the other is not RV. Psychic methods (controlling the RV process for the psychic, to the degree possible) are optional, variable and arbitrary. Dames and his coworkers have sold the world on the idea that only their method (I mean the experiment canceled--see above) "is" RV; this strips out science entirely so any amount of bogus stuff can promptly join it, and this ensures that if RV is defined by that method then those "former intelligence people" are forever the only true authorities/experts. Of course, Ed also managed to staple RV instantly and directly to 50 years of very effective disinformation in UFOlogy, and to create a list of favored 'trainees' who went into the public eye and did at least as much damage as he has (Dr. Courtney Brown and Aaron Donahue primarily).
I might add that real viewers may choose to use the method referred to above; Daz uses it and does well with it, as do others. Some people use the Silva method. For the record, the primary remote viewing methodology demonstrated in science would be Ganzfeld. That is an altered state, masked eye, red light, white noise, verbal communication approach. With less officially hokey setup, anybody can try this at home. Learn something about target selection and tasking and teach someone near you.
RC
A person could in theory even practice toward that. Some people would probably be more likely to succeed at it sometimes than others. But on the whole, MOST basketball players do not do freethrows from 3x the 'freethrow line distance'. So, that is not how I would set up a trial to test that particular claim.