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).