The Disappearance of Granger Taylor

Granger Taylor was thirty-two years old when he disappeared from his parents’ farm at Duncan, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, on the night of 29 November 1980. He left behind a wife, a half-completed UFO replica in the field beside the house, an extensively equipped workshop, and a one-page note pinned to the door of his bedroom in which he stated that he had accepted an invitation from extraterrestrial beings to travel with them for forty-two months. His blue Datsun pickup truck was missing. He has never returned.

The Man

Taylor was, by any conventional measure, an extraordinary mechanical talent. He had left school early and built, at his parents’ farm, a working steam locomotive from scrap parts; he had then restored a Second World War Kittyhawk fighter aircraft, a Bristol Bolingbroke bomber, and several rare automobiles, all of which were eventually purchased by museums or collectors. He was largely self-taught. Neighbours and family described him as gentle, focused on his projects, and somewhat solitary, with a strong interest in unexplained aerial phenomena and a habit of reading widely but unsystematically on the subject.

In 1978 he had begun construction of a full-scale flying saucer in the field next to the farmhouse. The structure, built mainly from the receiver dish of a satellite ground station and various aircraft parts, was about thirty feet across. He told relatives and visitors that he was studying the principles of antigravity propulsion and intended that the vehicle should one day fly. By 1980 the project had been substantially completed, and Taylor had taken to sleeping in the saucer on warm nights, where, he later said, he had begun to communicate with two beings who identified themselves as visitors from a distant world.

The Disappearance

In the days before 29 November Taylor’s behaviour became, to those who knew him, increasingly distracted. He gave away certain personal possessions, settled small debts, and spoke of being about to take a long trip. On the evening of 29 November a violent winter storm swept across Vancouver Island, with high winds, heavy rain and falling temperatures. Taylor told his stepmother that he was going to drive into Duncan to look at the storm and to see if he could observe anything in the sky. He left the house in his Datsun pickup. He did not return.

The note was discovered the following morning. Written in his characteristically neat hand, it read in part: “Dear mother and father, I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship, as recurring dreams assured a 42-month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe, then return. I am leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any. Please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help. Love, Granger.” On the reverse he had drawn a rough map of the British Columbia coast, with a route that appeared to lead to a point off Mount Prevost.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were notified the same day. A search was undertaken. The truck was not found. No body was found. The terrain around Mount Prevost is heavily forested and is laced with old logging roads and abandoned cuts; a vehicle could remain hidden there for years.

The 1986 Discovery

Six years after the disappearance, in 1986, a logging crew on the south side of Mount Prevost discovered the wreckage of a small pickup truck in a deep ravine. Pieces of metal recovered from the scene included parts that were tentatively identified as belonging to Taylor’s Datsun. Among the debris were small fragments of bone, sufficiently degraded that no positive identification could be made; the fragments were never definitively linked to Taylor. Investigators concluded that the wreck site was consistent with a vehicle having driven off a logging road during severe weather and falling some distance into the ravine. Two cases of dynamite, which Taylor was known to have possessed for stump-clearing on the family farm, were also among the debris and may have detonated on impact.

The discovery was treated by the RCMP as the probable resolution of the case. A coroner’s inquest, however, declined to formally declare Taylor dead in the absence of conclusive identification, and his family did not press the matter. To his stepmother in particular the question remained open, in part because the recovered fragments could not be matched to him and in part because the journey he had described in his note was supposed to last forty-two months — a period that had elapsed in May 1984, two years before the wreckage was found.

Conventional Explanations

The most plausible conventional reading is that Taylor, in a fragile mental state, drove into a storm on a poorly maintained logging road, lost control of his vehicle and was killed in the crash. The dynamite in the cab, detonating on impact or in the subsequent fire, would account for the dispersed and unidentifiable nature of the recovered remains. A man preparing for what he believed was a journey from which he might not return could plausibly write a note such as the one he left, and could plausibly settle his small affairs in the days beforehand without anyone in the family recognising the warning signs.

A second possibility, which Taylor’s family at times considered, is that he staged the disappearance and continued to live elsewhere under another identity. Nothing has emerged in the intervening decades to support such a reading, and his deep attachment to his workshop and to his projects makes it implausible that he would simply have walked away.

Legacy

The case has come to occupy a particular niche in the literature of UFO contactees, in which a man of demonstrable practical intelligence and considerable mechanical skill became convinced that he had been invited to travel with non-human visitors and acted on that conviction. It is sometimes discussed alongside earlier cases such as the 1953 Kinross air defence incident and other accounts of disappearances connected to claimed UFO contact.

The half-completed saucer remained in the field at Duncan for many years and was eventually dismantled. Taylor’s restored aircraft are in museums. The note, framed, is preserved by his family. Whether he died alone in a crashed truck on a stormy mountain in the autumn of 1980, or whether he kept some other appointment, is a question that the available evidence is unable to resolve.

Sources

• Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Missing Person Report: Granger Taylor, Duncan, British Columbia, December 1980.
• The Vancouver Sun, “The Man Who Built a Spaceship,” coverage 1980-1986.
• Birch, M. Disappearance of Granger Taylor: Historical File. Cowichan Valley Museum, 2010.
• Coroners Service of British Columbia. Inquest record, 1987.