@dalem the situation is very similar here in the west. there are various 20th century fringes like "psionics"/"radionics", Wilhelm Reich's theories, synchronicity (Jung) or seriality (Kammerer), remote viewing, astral projection, various things that are distinct from the traditional magick and occultism stuff because they aren't connected to any particular religious view and attempt to get at some fundamental laws behind the fact that basically every civilization in human history has had magickal practices and reported experiences with "supernatural" entities.

but the problem is exactly the same as you said, there's a lot of new age garbage that is at best superficially engaged with this stuff to scam people who are varying degrees of mentally ill I guess. there's a part of me that wonders whether things being similar in eastern Europe (or Poland at least) is a direct consequence of the collapse of the USSR and forcibly shoving capitalist/western values down everyone's throats since that kind of inherently is going to lead to a situation like this where something that lacks institutional support or legitimacy ends up being exploited by like, a very specific form of predatory lumpen individual I guess.

anyway yeah I dislike calling this hypothetical electromagnetic phenomenon the "life force" because that itself is a term that has been heavily appropriated by new age con artists and is itself complicated because like I said there's a long tradition in the east of attempting to describe what this "life force" is and how it works. I happen to be of the sort of weird perspective that I believe in a lot of things that conflict with a traditionally materialist view but I also have been influenced a lot by the ufologist Jacques Vallée because he essentially laid out the framework for how to approach parascience in a modern and scientifically (as best we can at least at this stage) rigorous way to understand how these things work. because if they're real then there must be a logic to them and the task is to pin down what that is.

I'll check out that CIA dossier, I've been aware of it for awhile but never read it in detail. also, speaking of Robert Pavlita, I just found this article written by someone who claimed to have met Pavlita in person and seen the psychotronic generator demonstrated: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_psychotronicweapons05.htm

I also think it's interesting that it mentions that Pavlita was specifically influences by alchemy because there's an extremely rich (overwhelming in fact) history of alchemical texts that one could investigate to try to reverse engineer whatever he was doing. the article also mentions Pavlita's theory that the human body has at least 68 energy centers, which is interesting the Chinese theory of the energy body (which I know a decent amount about from being into Daoism) that is used in TCM and acupuncture has a similar thing about how the body has various meridians. it's also a very extensive and old system that has received some amount of validation in western medical science but a lot of it is also considered to be new age pseudoscience (which IMO is at least partly because western science is arbitrarily dogmatic and controlled by the interests of the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries).

>during the transition from socialism to capitalism in central/eastern Europe of late 80s and 90s, a lot of things were destroyed or """Lost"""

I can't remember off the top of my head what this was and would have to dig it up again but when I last looked into this I remember there being at least some texts from the Czech psychotronics researchers that were out there, out of print and only available in Czech but seemingly not impossible to acquire.