What Happened to Granger Taylor?

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Fact or fiction?

Is there anything more terrifying than the idea of being abducted by aliens?

History is littered with such accounts, depicting scenes of horrifying experimentation.

But what if some of these beings were benevolent, instead inviting us to learn from them?

In 1980, one man may have been given that chance.

Whether still on this planet or not, his disappearance has left us asking, what happened to Granger Taylor?

On the morning of the 30th of November 1980, the citizens of Duncan, British Columbia cautiously emerged from their battered and broken homes.

Fallen trees blocked the narrow logging roads, farm animals had wandered through smashed fences, and debris lay scattered across fields and gardens.

The previous evening, the town had endured one of the fiercest storms in living memory.

Gale-force winds had knocked out power across the Cowetchin Valley, whilst countless properties were left with shattered windows, stripped rooftops and uprooted trees.

Still, Duncan was a resilient and self-reliant community.

Before long, neighbours were outside with chainsaws, axes and shovels, working together to clear the wreckage and reconnect vital services.

Yet, as the town set about its recovery, there was a quiet sense that their efforts might have been eased by the presence of one enigmatic figure, a gifted mechanic and local legend who often solved engineering problems just for the joy of it.

His name was Granger Taylor, but on that storm last night, he had vanished without a trace.

By mid-morning, word spread that Granger had not been seen since the previous evening.

At first, locals traded light-hearted rumours, spinning outlandish theories that seemed fitting for a man as eccentric as he was brilliant.

But beneath the surface chatter lay a growing unease.

Something felt different this time, and the truth of what had happened would prove stranger and far more tragic than anyone in Duncan could have imagined.

That morning, Granger's stepfather discovered a handwritten note his son had left behind.

To many, it looked like a farewell, but Granger had taken care to state otherwise.

In the letter, he insisted this was not an ending, but the beginning of a journey, one that he claimed would last three and a half years, after which he promised to return.

That promise was never fulfilled.

Despite his family leaving the back gate unlocked for years in the hope of his return, Granger never came home.

Over four decades later, his his fate remains one of Canada's most perplexing mysteries.

Whether or not there will ever be an ending, the story of his life and disappearance continues to fascinate, a testament to the extraordinary mind of a man who dreamed of possibilities far beyond his small-town home.

Granger Ormond Taylor was born on the 7th of October 1948 in Duncan, a modest fishing and logging town in British Columbia, Canada.

Life in Duncan during the post-war years was quiet but tough, with most families depending on forestry, farming or the local canneries to get by.

Despite always having a close-knit and caring family, Granger's childhood was marked early on by tragedy.

His father drowned in an accident at a waterside retreat on Horn Lake when Granger was still very young.

Though he had only known known his father briefly, the loss left a deep impression.

Relatives recalled that from this point, he became more inward-looking, a quiet boy who preferred to spend hours on his own tinkering with whatever objects he could lay his hands on.

A few years later, his mother remarried.

Her new husband, Jim Taylor, was a kind and patient man who already had children of his own.

By all accounts, Granger grew to love his stepfather and new new siblings with the same affection he showed his own kin, and the household was described as warm and supportive.

Even so, the death of his father had shaped him permanently.

Friends from his youth remembered him as thoughtful and gentle, but with an intensity that sometimes set him apart.

School was never where Granger's talents lay.

He dropped out in the eighth grade not because he lacked intelligence, but because his passions pulled him in another direction.

From a young age, he had displayed an extraordinary mechanical aptitude, the kind that could not be taught in a classroom.

At just 14, after working briefly as a mechanics apprentice, he astonished neighbours by constructing a fully functional one-cylinder car out of salvaged parts.

The handmade vehicle still survives today, displayed at the Duncan Forest Museum.

By 17, he had gone even further, assembling a working bulldozer that he used to help neighbours with odd jobs and construction projects.

Granger's reputation grew with each accomplishment, but his most impressive project came in his early 20s.

In 1969, he stumbled upon the remains of an abandoned locomotive that had once hauled timber across Vancouver Island.

The engine was a ruin, its wheels locked, its frame rusting, and and trees growing up through its body.

Most people would have seen scrap metal.

Granger saw a challenge.

Over nearly two years, he painstakingly fabricated new panels, freed the seas machinery and rebuilt the engine into working order.

It was an achievement far beyond his age or formal training.

and when the province of British Columbia eventually purchased the restored locomotive for preservation, the feat cemented his reputation locally.

By then, Granger had become something of a legend around Duncan.

His property, cluttered with cars, trucks, heavy machinery and unfinished projects, was affectionately nicknamed the Sleepy Hollow Museum.

Local children loved to explore the strange collection and watch Granger at work.

To them, he was both a mentor and a source of endless fascination.

To adults, he was recognized as an eccentric genius, a a man who seemed capable of coaxing life back into anything mechanical.

Yet even Granger's prodigious energy was not limitless.

After years of restoring vehicles, trains and heavy equipment, he began to lose interest.

Once a person masters a craft to the point where it no longer offers challenge, the search for something new becomes inevitable.

For Granger, that search would soon lead him away from the roads and railways altogether, and instead towards the skies.

He became interested in flight as an adult earning his pilot's license and restoring a decrepit World War II Kitty Hawk fighter to full working order an achievement that spoke volumes about his patience and skill.

He later sold the aircraft for $20,000, a sum that in the 1970s was more than respectable.

In fact, Granger had amassed a significant amount of money through his projects, buying derelict vehicles for scrap prices, painstakingly rebuilding them and then selling the results to collectors or state services.

Yet despite this, he lived frugally.

Money held little appeal for him beyond what it could buy in tools and materials.

He never expressed a desire to move away from the family farm, to marry or raise a family or to seek recognition outside of his workshop.

His life revolved around the quiet rhythms of the Taylor property and the endless pursuit of mechanical challenges.

It was this restless need for new problems to solve that eventually turned his attention skyward.

Having conquered cars, bulldozers, locomotives and even a warplane, Granger began looking for puzzles that conventional machines could no longer provide.

Inevitably, he became fascinated by UFOs.

Here was a challenge unlike any other.

Kraft reported to defy the laws of aerodynamics, accelerating and maneuvering in ways no human engineer could yet explain.

His curiosity soon hardened into obsession.

He spent long hours alone, poring over books and eyewitness accounts, trying in vain to comprehend how such vehicles, if real, could function.

The timing of his growing obsession was no accident.

In the late 1960s and 70s, public interest in UFOs surged across North America.

Television, radio and print were filled with reports of strange objects in the sky.

Even closer to home, sightings occurred within miles of the Taylor Farm.

On New Year's Eve 1969 for instance, three nurses and several patients at the Cowichin District Hospital reported a large satin-shaped craft hovering just 60 feet from their window.

The case made headlines locally and kicked off a spate of sightings in the area.

For a mechanically gifted young man already attuned to flight and machinery, such reports must have landed with seismic impact.

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As Grainger immersed himself in the subject, he also began to build.

At the bottom of his garden, he constructed what what he described as a life-sized UFO replica, fashioned from two discarded satellite dishes and reinforced with scrap metal.

Inside he fitted a wood-burning stove, a couch and a television, creating a strange hybrid space, part study, part workshop, part retreat.

Locals recalled the site with fond amusement.

Children from nearby farms would often wander over to see Granger's spaceship, whilst neighbours shook their heads but admired his dedication.

For Granger however it was no eccentric joke.

He often slept inside the craft using the quiet space to read through his growing library of UFO literature.

That library soon became extensive.

He collected books written by pilots who had reported strange lights, by contactees who claimed to have spoken with extraterrestrials, and by theorists who speculated wildly about propulsion systems.

Yet the deeper he went, the more frustrated he became.

Much of the material boiled down to anecdote, speculation or pseudoscience, and none of it offered the kind of concrete mechanical solutions he craved.

For a man who could rebuild a steam locomotive from the ground up, the inability to extract hard, testable knowledge must have been infuriating.

For most people, such dead ends would have been enough to extinguish the obsession, but for Granger, the opposite seemed to happen.

Something in him refused to let go.

Whether born of fate, imagination, or something altogether stranger, he came to believe that the answers he sought would not be found in books at all.

Instead, they would be given to him directly.

He would later claim that he had received a message from beyond the stars.

Whenever Granger went out socially, UFOs were never far from his mind.

Friends remembered how quickly he would steer conversations towards his latest theories or observations, often with an intensity that made it difficult to change the subject.

For most it was just another quirk of an eccentric but brilliant man.

But one evening, whilst meeting with lifelong companion Bob Nielsen, Granger confided something far more unusual.

During one of his long stretches of isolation, he claimed he had been contacted telepathically by an intelligence not of this world.

He described it as hearing clear voices in his head, though he never saw who they belonged to.

Nielsen, unsurprisingly, was sceptical.

Still, he humoured his friend, knowing how seriously Granger took such claims.

Granger insisted the communications were real and that they had provided him with small fragments of information.

When he asked how alien craft were able to maneuver so impossibly in the sky, the only answer he was given was that the secret lay in the power of magnets.

He suggested these conversations became more frequent and with each one he grew more convinced that he was being prepared for something.

In October 1980, Granger astonished Nielsen by announcing that the beings had invited him on a trip through the galaxy.

Bob assumed it was just a dream or the result of Granger's vivid imagination.

Their friends shared this view and in half-joking fashion they even threw Granger a farewell party, convinced he would still be in his garage working on machinery long after the date he claimed he was destined to depart.

But only weeks later, events took a more sinister turn.

On the evening of November the 29th 1980, with the town of Duncan bracing itself for one of the worst storms in living memory, Granger walked into Bob's grill, a diner where he was a familiar face.

Waitress Linda Barron recalled that he was dressed in his usual attire, logging boots, jeans, t-shirt and a knitted jumper.

Yet she noticed he was carrying no overcoat or rain gear ⁇ a strange decision given the severe weather warnings in place.

Granger quietly ate his meal, paid his bill and left the diner at around 6.30pm, just as the winds began to batter the town.

According to Linda, Nothing about his demeanor suggested he would soon vanish, but she would become the last known person ever to see him alive.

That night, he drove away in his beloved Datsun truck and disappeared into the storm.

The following morning, as Duncan's residence surveyed the damage, Granger's stepfather made a chilling discovery back home.

On the table lay a handwritten note in Granger's own hand, addressed to his parents.

It read,

Dear mother and father, I have gone away to walk aboard an alien ship, 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

This was not a conventional suicide note.

Taylor stated plainly that he intended to return after a 42-month voyage, framing his departure as temporary rather than final.

In the same letter, he referred to a will he had already prepared, leaving all his possessions to his parents.

What many found most striking was the wording.

Where a standard will might say deceased, Granger had carefully scratched out that term and replaced it with departed, as if to emphasise that he had not died but had simply left.

In the days before he vanished, Granger quietly thanked his stepfather Jim for everything he had done, but offered no explanation for the remark.

He never told his family about the alleged telepathic messages, nor did he warn them that he planned to leave.

His mother was away on holiday when he disappeared and later spoke of the shock of returning to find him gone, with no chance, even unknowingly, to say goodbye.

With no body and no immediate trace of the Datsun, authorities struggled to produce a clear account of what had happened.

The violent storm that tore through Duncan on the night he disappeared had brought down trees, blocked rural roads and damaged power lines, hampering early search efforts.

In the months that followed, the case drifted from headlines into an enduring local mystery.

What survives from that period is a patchwork of newspaper clippings and the more enthusiastic claims of ufologists, material that, whilst intriguing, does not amount to proof.

To assess the matter fairly, it is necessary to consider the more prosaic explanations first.

The most commonly cited theory is that Granger took his own life, constructing the narrative of an extraterrestrial voyage to soften the blow for those he loved.

Supporters of this view point to his deep frustration with the limits of UFO literature and the long solitary hours he spent pursuing claims that could not be tested.

They note that he had formally drafted a will, had left instructions and had given away his belongings.

patterns that in many cases precede self-harm.

The letters careful language, they argue, may have been intended to comfort his family with the idea of a temporary absence rather than finality.

Yet this interpretation leaves a central question unanswered.

If Granger intended suicide, where is the body?

His disappearance produced no remains, no obvious scene, and no definitive sign of where he went or what he did.

The absence of physical evidence is precisely what has allowed the case to persist.

Without a location, almost any explanation from the straightforward to the extraordinary remains difficult to rule out.

A second, equally grounded possibility is accidental death during the storm, perhaps on a remote logging road with the evidence obscured by weather and time.

Proponents suggest that fallen trees, landslides or flooding could have concealed both man and vehicle.

In rugged country, a missed turning can lead into terrain where searchers seldom pass.

This scenario accounts for his lack of heavy weather gear that evening and the fact he offered no farewell to family.

It does not require intent, only misjudgment at a bad moment.

compounded by severe conditions.

Both lines of reasoning acknowledge what the record actually shows.

A carefully worded note, a will prepared in advance, a quiet expression of thanks to his stepfather, and a disappearance coinciding with extreme weather.

Neither, however, resolves the fact that in those early weeks, nothing conclusive was found.

It is that gap, more than any single detail, that keeps the mystery alive and invites, for some, less ordinary explanations to fill the silence.

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In 1986, six years after his disappearance, the remains of clothing, bone fragments and shards of a truck believed to have been Taylor's were discovered in a crater on an unnamed mountain.

It is postulated that Taylor had been carrying dynamite in his truck, which he normally used for clearing tree stumps.

Rumours circulated that the young prodigy drove up that mountain and simply blew himself to smithereens.

Though none of the remains were ever proven to have been those of Taylor or his truck.

For instance, the metal shards that were found were pink in colour, rather than the light blue of Taylor's vehicle.

Furthermore, this was before the age of DNA analysis, so nobody can say for certain whether the bones really were Taylor's at all.

That being said, given the length of time between his disappearance and the discovery of the remains, it is possible that weathering and erosion of the metal had caused discoloration and the rest of Taylor's body may have succumbed to animal predation.

However, without solid evidence, the door to speculation remains open.

Many locals have pointed out that dynamite was indeed something Granger frequently kept on hand for his projects, and that it was a notoriously unstable compound to store and transport.

Even a small miscalculation could have caused a fatal accident during the storm.

Yet, the idea that he intentionally chose that night and that method continues to divide opinion.

There are others who claim that Taylor may have wanted to start a new life elsewhere after all and faked his own death in order to make a fresh start.

But again, if this was the case, why would he do such a thing knowing it would cause his family and friends untold pain?

Surely, it would be far easier to simply move.

He had money in the bank and a man of his talents would no doubt be able to find steady work wherever he settled.

Perhaps it was an action befitting the eccentricity of his character, but this would stray far from the aloof, delving deep into outright cruelty.

Even those who regarded him as eccentric never considered him callous or unfeeling.

His note to his parents, filled with care, does not align with the mindset of a man willing to vanish and deliberately wound those closest to him.

With it being unlikely that Taylor ran away and having displayed no signs of depression that any of his close friends or family were able to pick up on, what is the most likely of explanations?

Whilst neither law enforcement nor the family at large ever made mention of it, his friend Robert Keller and sister Grace Ann Young both claim that Granger had a history of drug use, common to many younger people, especially of that era.

Granger had allegedly smoked marijuana for years and, according to his sister, had been taking significant doses of LSD in the months before he went missing.

Some acquaintances even recalled that he seemed more withdrawn in the weeks leading up to his disappearance, often speaking in cryptic terms about space and destiny.

This, combined with his obsessive interest in UFOs, may have contributed to a dangerous dangerous cocktail of altered perception and obsession.

With hallucinations and other psychological abnormalities being associated with these substances, LSD in particular, it may be reasonable to assume that Granger was earnestly expecting to be carried away aboard an alien craft, having hallucinated these conversations for weeks.

He likely followed his apparent orders to drive to the mountain for collection under the cover of the storm, and either whilst under the influence or by some accident, the dynamite in Granger's truck detonated, killing him instantly.

To those who loved him, the theory is heartbreaking, because it suggests that his brilliance was not enough to guard him against the frailty of the human mind.

Other plausible theories are that he was kidnapped and killed, his vehicle stolen.

Or that he drove into quicksand or a sinkhole during the storm and that his body remains trapped underground.

Logging roads and backcountry tracks in British Columbia are notorious for their hazards.

A single wrong turn in bad weather can send a vehicle down a ravine or into a washout and the storm on the night he vanished was more than enough to obscure evidence.

In such rugged terrain Even large objects can disappear from sight for decades.

On the other hand, hand, whilst an accident may be the most likely explanation, we can't rule out that Taylor did in fact have a supernatural experience beyond our understanding.

One that he bravely did not shy away from, instead greeting it with open arms as another challenge to be faced, as he had done his whole life.

But if this was the case, why has he not returned as he said he would?

Could it be that the intelligence that allegedly communicated with him was in fact malicious, manipulating him into a false sense of security?

Or could it be a matter of time dilation?

As he would theoretically be travelling at phenomenal speeds, what passes by as three years to him would pass by much slower for us back on Earth.

and he may still yet return.

For some in Duncan, this thought offered a small sliver of comfort that Granger's absence was not final, but only delayed.

There is so much unknown about this case as there is about the universe at large.

All we do know is that on a stormy November night, an enigmatic man, loved not only by his friends and family, but by his community, disappeared on a voyage into the unknown.

His story has endured because it sits uneasily between the rational and the extraordinary.

Too much evidence points towards tragedy, yet too many unanswered questions prevent closure.

Perhaps Jim Taylor, Granger's stepfather, puts it best.

I can hardly believe Granger's off in a spaceship, but if there is a flying object out there, he's the one to find it.

Let's hope that he did just that, and that somewhere out in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way, there is a human being by the name of Granger Taylor, having the experience of a lifetime traveling amongst the stars, even if he is a little late getting home.

Bed times glorious.