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How Did You Discover Fortean Times Magazine?

Tigerhawk

Tigerhawk

Godzilla Just Has Anger Management Issues....
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I first heard of FT in 1995 when my sister and now brother in law went shopping for my birthday present. I'd asked for a "weird" book (being an odd teenager, I like that sort of thing), and my brother in law had found The World's Most Incredible Stories - The Best Of Fortean Times. It wasn't until early 2001 that I actually found a shop selling the magazine, but for those few years the book was a constant read. So, I thank my brother in law to this day!
 
In a petrol station near Nuneaton college when I was studying there and house sharing with Andy Coulson's little brother .. I couldn't tell you which issue but I think it had cartoon dog wearing a tartan hat on the front cover .. or that fibre glass shark sticking out of that bloke's roof possibly .. '91 I think ..

I can take full credit for Express News on Cromer's Church St. now stocking it on their shelves as of a few years back.
 
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I only started reading the magazine once encounters/ uri gellars encounters folded, i was browsing in smiths looking for an alternative, and that's how i fell in love with the fortean times.
 
I was aware of it from the occasional TV report, but once I found a copy in a comics shop in the mid-90s there was no going back.
 
Lord Lucan said:
In a newsagents years ago. The cover was interesting covering many of my own interests, so I bought it and was hooked. Now I get given a subscription every Christmas.
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Same here, I was looking at the astronomy mags, and FT was placed in amongst them, and I've been a fan since...
 
I honestly can't remember. I think I saw it advertised in a different magazine, back in the early 90s.
 
As well as having read a couple of bootlegged copies of "The News" in the late 70s (and of course around that era, a few editions of 'Whole Earth Catalog', and the seminal 'Real Time'), I started buying very-early copies of "Fortean Times" from railway station news kiosks in the 80s. Edinburgh, King's Cross, Glasgow Central, Peterborough

I think this was the early smaller-sized version of the magazine (I'm going to guess maybe half-foolscap?) which I *feel* was bigger than 'Old Moore's Almanc' (which it always appeared on the newsstands with).

There was also a weird Atlantic Deep Sea Fisherman's magazine that looked confusingly like it (for size/colour) filled with information about fishing areas and retirement homes, and what to do if a shark bit off your head.

Buying 'Fortean Times' (or Old Moore's) was a bit edgy, undoubtedly countercultural.

People wouldn't stare at you as if it was a copy of Playboy or Club International, but it was either totally-unknown of (by most) or, viewed as being an anarchist's compendium of Loch Nessean UFOlogical sacreligous dodgyness (thank goodness)

I really must start posting extracts from 'Real Time'....one of the paper 'websites' decades before the advent of the internet
 
Found it in a local newsagents in mid 90s. First one I bought had X files on the cover. Subscribed via even more local news agent as soon as I'd read it.
 
On the shelf in either Tower Records or Barnes and Noble, near all the UFO and similar magazines. I had already read Fort's books (recommended in an issue of The Monster Times in the 1970s if I remember correctly) so the word Fortean caught my eye. It clearly was more wide-ranging and less "true believer" than the nearby titles, so I was immediately hooked.
 
I think I started out at the beginning back when it was The News. Iirc, I picked it up in Mugwump in Durham. It mostly sells scented candles and other fancy women’s things these days but then it was all macrame, joss sticks, plaid cloth frogs, Gandalf posters and bags with little mirrors sewn onto them.
 
Analogue Boy said:
I picked it up in Mugwump in Durham. It mostly sells scented candles and other fancy women’s things these days but then it was all macrame, joss sticks, plaid cloth frogs, Gandalf posters and bags with little mirrors sewn onto them.
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also wonky ceramic bowls filled with a variety of beads, small metal fish and rolls of paper which allegedly blossomed into flowers when you dropped them in water.
 
I can’t remember exactly how or when. I was a regular weekend visitor to the Atlantis bookshop back in the late seventies and early eighties but don’t remember them ever selling it. I probably saw it in WH Smith at the Elephant and Castle and became hooked.
 
I came across it in Dark they were and Golden Eyed, around 1980, intermittently picked up copies from various SF/Alternative bookshops, and the bookstall on Southampton station (which had some odd magazine buying practices, got lots of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine from there), and regularly from issue 69 to the present.
 
I have a confession to make:

I have never read it. I've never looked for a copy of it. I've never held a physical copy of FT mag.

I only got to know the term 'Fortean Times' in the late 80s-early 90s when picking up on it in conversations with similarly-minded people, and then with Fortean TV.

If you'd like to sue me and my ass, I'll agree to settle out of court to save the bills?

I can offer you a half-eaten jar of black olives and a slightly dog-eared pin-up of the Rev. Lionel as a starting position. I can probably throw in my waterlogged-then-dried-out copy of Peter Underwood's Ghosts Of Somerset if you insist.
 
I read about it a lot and saw it mentioned but never tracked down a copy until about summer 1994. I think my first issue came with that free 'alien detector' thing, which lived next to our sofa for years. Then it became our regular Sunday lunch in the pub reading. Never thought to look in Forbidden Planet, doh!
 
AnonyJoolz said:
I have a confession to make:

I have never read it. I've never looked for a copy of it. I've never held a physical copy of FT mag.

I only got to know the term 'Fortean Times' in the late 80s-early 90s when picking up on it in conversations with similarly-minded people, and then with Fortean TV.

If you'd like to sue me and my ass, I'll agree to settle out of court to save the bills?

I can offer you a half-eaten jar of black olives and a slightly dog-eared pin-up of the Rev. Lionel as a starting position. I can probably throw in my waterlogged-then-dried-out copy of Peter Underwood's Ghosts Of Somerset if you insist.
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You will therefore never understand how the paper width got thinner and thinner as time went on.
 
A) A friend subscribed to it and I picked it up from his breakfast table one morning. This would have been in the early 90s.

B) I read first saw the term 'Fortean' in an appendix to the Call of the Cthulhu roleplaying game rulebook.

C) I'm unsure of the chronology, but at some stage I saw a reference (in print) to the Fortean Times being a model for clear writing in contemporary English (I paraphrase), which made me think I might like it, what with my having had an interest in the supernatural since childhood. I wrote about the Spanish Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation at A-Level, (the history of) Psychical Research during my bachelor's degree and spiritualism and psychical research in nineteenth century literature as my M.A. thesis. Come to think of it, I taught an EFL lesson using a Fortean Times article while taking a CELTA in London. I think it was on crop circles and hill figures, which gave me an opportunity to project the Cerne Abbas Giant onto the wall to wild (foreign) guffaws. The point was to impart a nice lexical set of terms concerning speculation (deduce, hypothesis, prove, disprove, conclude, rule out, evidence etc.) and practise modal verbs of possibility/probability and frequency:

There is little evidence to support the Victorian theory that couples would have sex on the giant's penis in hope of conceiving... (for example).
 
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