Almost all great thinkers draw from others and influence others. This generates a 'halo effect' from each of the information points. When the information point is secret, the halo effect transports some of the information into the directly visible realm.
In this case, the halo effect includes research papers like this:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c1ea/9292f620128b90a8eccf6198200e94e2dff4.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=1RO4BAAAQBAJ&dq=cognitrons&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Those come from the field of machine reasoning and suggest that secret work extended into attempts to mechanically reproduce the remote viewing phenomenon with computers. I don't see most research into black projects carried too far into their halo effects, but refining the research approach of associating and mapping the halo effects has the potential for substantiating the content of the black project well beyond the government expenditure or memo trail. It would be the first step of an adverse state actor attempting reverse engineering. Open, crowd sourced projects can now match or exceed the information generation and analysis capabilities of many state actors.