The other thing to consider as far as genuine telepathy research is that, even if you threw billions of dollars at it, and still found absolutely no evidence whatsoever, it would still never dispel the "rumors" and conspiratorial ideas around it, because it's already classified as something potentially inexplicable by science. If science fails to prove it, then it just means science is wrong, or that telepathy is somehow out of the bounds of scientific inquiry. The same goes for ghosts, demons, God, etc.