Late on November 29, 1980, as a storm swept the island, a 32-year-old mechanic named Granger Taylor left his parents’ farmhouse in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, near the town of Duncan, British Columbia. He left behind a handwritten note explaining that he had gone to walk aboard an alien ship. Recurring dreams, he wrote, had promised him a 42-month voyage to explore the universe, after which he would return. He did not come back, and for more than five years nobody knew where he had gone.
The man who built a spaceship
Taylor had left school after the eighth grade and taught himself almost everything he knew about machines. Friends and family described him as shy, eccentric and gifted. As a boy he built a car powered by a single-cylinder engine. Later he hauled the parts of an abandoned steam locomotive out of the bush and restored it, and, working from photographs, he reconstructed a Second World War Curtiss Kittyhawk fighter around wreckage salvaged from the forest, shaping the missing parts out of old metal signs and hot-water tanks. According to a CBC documentary, the plane eventually went to a collector, and his family later traced it to an air museum in North Dakota.
By the late 1970s his interest had turned to space. On the family property he built a flying saucer, reportedly by welding together two large satellite dishes. It was never meant to fly. Friends said he used it as a place to sit and think, often while smoking cannabis, and he told them he was receiving messages from beings elsewhere who had offered him passage. His friends and relatives have said he also experimented with psychedelic drugs, and some who looked into his life suspect he may have had bouts of depression or mania. His parents insisted he showed no signs of mental illness.
The disappearance
Taylor had told a close friend that his visitors would come under cover of a storm, and November 29 brought one of the worst in years to the valley. That evening he ate at his favorite diner and announced that he was off to meet the visitors from space; nobody believed him. He had also rewritten his will, replacing words about death with words about departure. He drove off in his Datsun pickup and was not seen again. A quantity of dynamite, which the family kept legally for clearing stumps, was missing from the farm.
Police and family searched for months without result. When the 42 months ran out in May 1984, his parents were still leaving the back door unlocked.
What was found
In March 1986 forestry workers came across a blast site on Mount Prevost, the mountain above the valley and not far from the Taylor farm. Pieces of a vehicle were scattered widely, some embedded in trees. Police matched the serial number stamped on the twisted frame to Taylor’s pickup, and a police dog search turned up bone fragments and scraps of a shirt that his mother recognized as one she had made for him. No skull or teeth were recovered, and in an era before routine DNA testing the remains could not be formally identified, but the coroner accepted that Taylor had died there. According to Garry Rodgers, a retired RCMP detective and former coroner who has written about the case, the death was classified as undetermined rather than suicide, because nothing in Taylor’s history pointed to suicidal intent.
The explanations
Some of Taylor’s friends have continued to believe, or to hope, that he really did leave the planet. The physical evidence points the other way: a truck known to be his, destroyed by a large explosion on a remote mountain road, with human bones in the debris and dynamite missing from his home. What remains open is his state of mind. He may have deliberately ended his life in a way that matched his belief in departure, or he may have died in an act he thought was something else. Tyler Hooper, who spent four years researching the case for the CBC documentary Spaceman (2019), concluded that Taylor most likely died in a fiery explosion on the mountainside the night he disappeared.
Where it stands
The case is closed as a death of undetermined cause. Granger Taylor did not come back in 42 months, but his story has become one of Canada’s best-known alien-abduction legends, and the most likely answer to it lies on Mount Prevost rather than among the stars.