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A: More than I care to remember, Rohan.

At various times throughout its history, the FVZA was called upon to investigate, in no particular order, demons; goblins; ghouls; aliens; Bigfoot; chupacabras; trolls; dragons; voodoo zombies; the Golem; and scores of other real or imagined menaces.

The FVZA handled these cases by default: there simply was no other U.S. agency capable of investigating paranormal and extraterrestrial phenomena.

I didn't care for this role, as many of these investigations proved fruitless and they took time away from the vital work of tracking and fighting vampires and zombies. But I can't say it was a complete waste of time. I retain some special memories from those days.

I remember sipping moonshine with a family of mountain folk in the West Virginia forest while waiting for the Mothman to appear. And then there was the night I spent hiding in the reeds along the shores of the Rio Grande with a local deputy sheriff, listening for the cries of La Llorona (the wailing woman). I lived among the Iroquois in upstate New York for an entire week while we tracked the fearsome Wendigo (it turned out to be a werewolf).

1947 headline on the Roswell UFO incident

Alas, like Linus waiting in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin, my paranormal diversions often came up empty. But there were exceptions.

In the summer of 1947, an alien spacecraft crash-landed outside the small town of Roswell in southwestern New Mexico. Air Force officials recovered the remains of two alien life forms in the wreckage and transported them to Mountainair, New Mexico, home of the FVZA's Zozobra Project.

I was a young scientist then, working with the team that would one day discover the vampire vaccine. The aliens were put on ice in a heavily guarded outbuilding at the facility. Government officials wanted us to study the bodies and perform dissections.

I myself viewed the remains. They were six-foot-long, insectoid creatures with an exoskeleton and two large eyes on the ends of long stems. The buglike remains were a far cry from the big-headed, glassy-eyed aliens of popular culture.

I was anxjous to study the creatures' internal structures, but a day before the scheduled dissection, a cordon of trucks arrived at the facility and whisked the aliens away. We were told that the move was to protect us from exposure to any unknown viruses and bacteria, although many of us suspected an ulterior motive.

You see, McCarthyism was at its height in the United States at this time. In fact, many Zozobra Project scientists were suspected of being Communist spies. Most likely, the military higher-ups feared that any secrets about the aliens might fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. That was one theory, anyway. I didn't ask a lot of questions. My focus was on finding a vaccine to cure vampirism.

I never saw those remains again. Rumors persist that military eventually took the remains to Area 51 facility in Nevada, where they remain to this day.

Perhaps if the FVZA is reborn, we will have a branch dealing with extraterrestrials and cryptozoology. In the meantime, I plan to publish a database on the site with details on some of these creatures for informational purposes.