How and when did you first stumble across the lamented ATS?

[ArMaP]

It was on May 2003.

I had come from my father's funeral and, trying to find something that made me think about something else, I found an article about some possibly politically related assassination.
I went looking for more information about it and found ATS.

After one year of just reading I decided to create an account and try to improve my written English (that was much worse than it is today), so I joined ATS on 2004-06-24, a local holiday.

PS: I don't remember who was the assassinated man that brought all this into my life.

[Kurokage]

I stumbled across it in the late 90's after a friend had a close encounter of a black triangle in the UK. I lurked for many years and didn't actually join though till 2006 because of the crazy SERPO story.

[quintessentone]

A friend turned me onto discussion forums maybe around 2004/2005 and one of the later forums suggested was ATS as I complained there was nobody in my orbit, including her, to discuss the UFO/Alien mystery. At first I lurked and never engaged but rather studied the social aspects and researched subjects further on my own. Then she got on my case as to why I was lurking and not engaging, so I started engaging. I can say it was a difficult transition from lurker to contributor at first, but then one has to adopt a certain attitude where nobody really knows what's going on because everything is complex, but we can all still discuss or talk it out anyway or do deeper dives.

[FlyersFan]

2004
Googled about ghost discussions.

[Kurokage]

Did you Google or Ask Jeeves about ATS? Should be part of the question!!

Then we'll all know how long people lurked for      ​​​​​​​ 

[andy06shake]

I lurked till about 2011.

As to how i found the place.

I was at the end of falling down the conspiracy/alien/UFO rabbit hole i had been in since about 1995. 

ATS was around, and near enough in full swing mode. 

Populated by all sorts of people, well-read and full of information, on the subjects that interested me at the time. 

Glad i climbed out of that rabbit hole all the same.

It's not like i did not like the taste, but it does require a large pinch of salt.

[Moon68]

2007

I was looking around for story ideas involving MKUltra, alien and government conspiracies and multi-dimensional travel.

Got sucked into Hillary's birther conspiracy about Obama leading up to the Dem primary.

[SomeStupidName]

Did you Google or Ask Jeeves about ATS? Should be part of the question!!

Then we'll all know how long people lurked for      ​​​​​​​ 

Well I used webcrawler on Netscape navigator to get here.

[RadioKnecht]

For me it was, I believe, around 2008. I somehow, somewhere found a story about Paul McCartney being dead and being replaced by someone else in the Beatles.

I found that really amusing, and, before long, I had fallen in the ATS rabbit hole, becoming entangled with all types of super interesting conspiracy theories.

I was a random poster until around 2016, until the site was taken by the MAGA, Q and Trump crowd. When the extreme vitriol took over, I just stopped visiting the site.

[Johnny Canuck]

I had early access to the net through my university job and 2 hours of free phone-in daily. That was huge at the time. I think I bounced into ATS by way of BBs, then Rense, before it went crazy. 
Early Oughts, anyway.
Nice to be sorta back. Hope the politics don't kill this one, too.