Hello from Inverness — been lurking for ages, finally joining properly

Hi everyone. I've been reading threads on here for probably the best part of a year without making an account, which I know makes me exactly the sort of lurker the regulars probably find mildly irritating. Sorry about that. I finally signed up properly last week after the thread about the Highland cattle mutilation reports (whether or not it's foxes, which honestly might be the most Quirk Reports debate I've ever witnessed) because I had something to add and couldn't without an account.

A bit about me: I'm in my late thirties, live just outside Inverness, work in civil engineering which means I spend a lot of time outdoors in places that are remote enough to be properly unsettling after dark. The Scottish Highlands in November at half six in the morning before anyone else is around is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone with an overactive imagination, and I say that as someone who is supposedly a rational person.

My interest in all this started about six years ago when I had an experience near Loch Ness - not Nessie, before anyone asks, though that would have been tidier - that I've never been able to satisfactorily explain. Happy to write it up properly if people are interested. I've also had a long-standing obsession with the Flannan Isles lighthouse disappearance, which I know is technically historical rather than current, but it never stops being one of the strangest things I've ever read about.

Looking forward to actually contributing rather than just reading. The atmosphere here seems a lot less American-drama-podcast about everything, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Welcome! The Highland cattle thing got very heated very quickly, which is sort of what we do here. You'll fit right in. Definitely write up the Loch Ness experience - we love a first-hand account, especially from up that way where we don't have as many members as we do further south.

Fellow Scot here, though I'm down in Edinburgh these days. The Highlands at dark is genuinely something else - I did some fieldwork near Rannoch Moor a couple of years back and even with a full team it gets into your head. There's a quality to the silence that you don't get anywhere else in Britain.

Do write up the Loch Ness experience. I'm also a Flannan Isles obsessive so if you ever want to talk about that I am very much here for it.

Another lurker-turned-member here, joined about two months ago. It is a very good community once you get past the fact that roughly a third of any thread eventually turns into an argument about whether Americans are ruining paranormal research. (The answer, for the record, is: sort of, but they also fund a lot of it, so it's complicated.)

Write up the Loch Ness experience please! We get a lot of posts from the usual spots - Rendlesham Forest, Borley Rectory, the standard tour - and first-hand stuff from further afield is always interesting. Welcome along.

The atmosphere here seems a lot less American-drama-podcast about everything

Ha, that's genuinely one of the nicest things anyone's said about us. We try. It doesn't always work - give it a few weeks and you'll see a thread go completely off the rails over something like whether orb photographs constitute evidence (they don't, and I will die on that hill). But we mean well.

Welcome from Yorkshire. The Flannan Isles thing is fascinating and criminally underrepresented on here given how genuinely inexplicable it is. Three experienced lighthouse keepers, meal half eaten, clock stopped, one boot left behind. Even if you land on the most mundane explanation you can imagine it's still deeply strange.

Good to have you. Fair warning that the cattle mutilation thread now runs to fourteen pages and there is a sub-dispute about whether the word 'mutilation' is too loaded that has somehow taken on a life of its own. You may want to approach with caution.