I think a lot of it was Cold War paranoia. The US government got into a lot of weird stuff like MKULTRA just because there were rumors the Soviets were working on the same thing, and no one wanted to risk the possibility, however remote, that there might be something to it.
Also probably money laundering. Apparently there were a lot of connections between the USG's various psi programs and Scientology.
psi/RV predates the Cold War, the USA, and Western culture, and there's zero doubt it works, but that will be very hard for you to see unless you get first hand experience. My answer can get you from 0 to 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42528680
It's a self-revealing non-dismissal to associate with something you dislike. Maybe your hick uncle is poor, or a KKK member. Should you be punished, or condemned to poverty? But facts are: the Scientology connection I think is Hal Puthoff who was temporarily a member to study that organized religion apparently. So? US frontier science has a history with occult, such as NASA's Jack Parsons. In the real world, totality of programs is much bigger than 1 dude, unless you're fixated on that aspect, then it would seem to all revolve around that hahaha! :)
Another way to look at this is all of this skepticism is a very monocultural, in fact a very white, and by association with the faux-confident dismissals here a 'white-supremacist' viewpoint to take. While many cultures today embody pseudoscientific materialist dogma in a rush to embrace ‘scientific modernity’ , there’s also a widespread acceptance of psi phenomena (by many names) among Chinese, Indian, Central Asian, African and South American cultures.
Also probably money laundering. Apparently there were a lot of connections between the USG's various psi programs and Scientology.