Granger Taylor’s disappearance is one of British Columbia’s most baffling true stories — a brilliant mechanic, UFO fascination, recurring dreams, and a final note that reads like a farewell to Earth itself. In this episode, we explore the first part of his story and the strange path that led from a farm in Duncan to an unanswered question that still lingers decades later.
We follow Granger from his childhood in the Cowichan Valley to his reputation as a self-taught mechanical genius who could repair almost anything — from trucks and bulldozers to airplanes and a locomotive he brought back to life on his family farm. Along the way, we look at the people and places that shaped him, including the Duncan area’s long-standing UFO lore and the increasingly unusual beliefs that came to define his final months.
There’s also a darker side to the story. As Granger became more isolated and more convinced that aliens were contacting him, concerns grew about his mental health and drug use. His disappearance in the middle of a major storm only deepened the mystery.
Key Topics
[00:00:00] - Granger’s farewell letter and the premise of the mystery
[00:00:40] - Content warning and introduction to Granger Taylor
[00:01:32] - Granger’s personality, intelligence, and reputation in Duncan
[00:02:00] - Duncan, British Columbia, and the Cowichan Valley setting
[00:03:44] - Family background, loss, and the blended Taylor household
[00:05:36] - Granger’s mechanical genius and early work as a teenager
[00:06:33] - Fixing historic machines, airplanes, and the farm locomotive
[00:07:49] - His interest in aerodynamics and earning a pilot’s license
[00:08:09] - Mentoring Robert Keller and Granger’s influence on local youth
[00:09:08] - The pink Datsun truck and Granger’s eccentric personality
[00:09:45] - Duncan’s UFO lore and the 1970 hospital sighting
[00:11:40] - The “spaceship office” and his growing obsession with aliens
[00:12:26] - Dreams, alien contact, and talk of abduction
[00:13:20] - LSD use, mounting concern, and the lead-up to his disappearance
[00:14:30] - The storm of November 29, 1980, and Granger’s vanishing
Relevant Links
CBC article and documentary coverage of Granger Taylor: https://www.cbc.ca/
Cowichan Valley tourism and area background: https://www.tourismcowichan.com/
Duncan, BC city information: https://www.duncan.ca/
UFO history and reports in Canada: https://library-and-archives.canada.ca/
Granger Taylor’s story is part invention, part legend, and part unresolved tragedy. Whether you approach it as a mystery, a cautionary tale, or a remarkable portrait of an unusual mind, the details make it impossible to forget.
Next week’s follow-up will dig into the search, the clues that surfaced afterward, and the competing theories about what really happened to Granger Taylor.
[00:00:00] - [Higgsfield AI as Granger Taylor]
Dear Mother and Father, I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship as recurring dreams assured a forty two 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.
[00:00:26] - [Cassie]
Welcome to mishaps and mysteries. I'm your host, Cassie.
[00:00:33] - [Nina]
And I'm your host, Nina. Our podcast explores stories of misadventures in the wild landscapes of British Columbia, Canada. Thanks for being here with us today.
[00:00:40] - [Cassie]
This is episode 12, the out of this world story of Grainger Taylor, part one. Content warning for this episode. There will be brief discussions of drug use.
[00:00:55] - [Nina]
This case has been talked about by many people over the years. From podcasters like ourselves to a CBC documentary, a TV episode or two, and loads of online speculation and conspiracy theories. It's definitely a curious case. Depending on the theory you lean towards, it could stick with you because you believe something out of this world happened or it might be curious to you for no other reason than because of the unique person at the center of it. Born on 10/07/1948, Granger Orman Taylor was 32 years old in 1980.
[00:01:32] - [Nina]
He was said to be a big burly man. He stood five, ten, and was often referred to as Gentle Ben, a smart and kind bear character in a TV show from the sixties. Granger was eccentric, brilliant, quiet, and shy, and often described as socially awkward. He was always on a project. In fact, he had to keep busy with projects.
[00:01:55] - [Nina]
He was also the type that when he said he was going to do something, he would do it.
[00:02:00] - [Speaker 1]
Our very first episode was a story out of Vancouver Island. We've gone lots of places in the episodes that followed, but today we're back. This time on South Vancouver Island in the area around Duncan. Duncan sits nicely between BC's capital city of Victoria and the busy harbor city of Nanaimo. Fun fact about Duncan that we learned, it's actually the smallest city in Canada by land area.
[00:02:31] - [Speaker 1]
It would have had a population of around 4,200 in 1980. Today, the population isn't much larger at just over 5,000 in 2021. When you're the smallest town in Canada, it's not like you have much room to grow. Duncan lies within Mecowatine Valley, and this area has it all. It's got the Eastern Coast Of Vancouver Island with Salt Spring Island across the narrow channel, the Cowichan River, there's some smaller lakes as well, and the popular Cowichan Lake, and plenty of mountains and forests.
[00:03:07] - [Speaker 1]
Mount Prevot, otherwise known as Suakus, is the distinctive mountain that sits right near Duncan and has two rock bluffs. It's popular for hiking and mountain biking, and it's a prominent feature of the area. As most of the population and development is concentrated to the East, heading West, things become a lot more sparse. And it was here in the Duncan area that Granger Taylor lived on his family's 21 acre farm near Seminole Lake, a small shallow lake right close to town.
[00:03:44] - [Nina]
Granger was the eldest of seven children in a blended family. His biological dad drowned when Granger was just two years old at their family cabin at Horn Lake, which is a popular recreation area and is 120 kilometers north of Duncan. Some sources stated that he was never actually found and it was simply presumed drowned. This was a dark spot on this family story and would later be followed by loss again thirty years later. After a loss of her husband, Granger's mother Grace went on to remarry a widower named Jim Taylor who had three children himself.
[00:04:24] - [Nina]
They became a blended family of six children, three from each marriage. Grace and Jim later welcomed a seven child, the only biological child of both parents. Though distinction between all of them never mattered in the household, they were all simply a family. He wasn't known to have had any romantic partners. He did apparently more than once make sort of an ad in the newspaper looking for a partner.
[00:04:52] - [Nina]
He shared that he was shy and said he wasn't the best looking guy, which is kind of sad to think about him feeling that way about himself. But putting an ad like this in the newspaper wasn't as odd as it might sound today. In a time before apps like Tinder, it was definitely a way to put yourself out there. By 1980, it had become a bit of a cultural phenomenon. It could come at a costly price though because each word would cost money.
[00:05:22] - [Nina]
So actually, a lot of abbreviations came out of it at the time. Some you might even recognize like LTR for long term relationship. We've put a link to a story about it in our of interest section of the show notes.
[00:05:36] - [Cassie]
Granger was a mechanic. No. That's not right. He was more than that. He was a mechanical genius.
[00:05:45] - [Cassie]
He could build anything. As a kid, he had enjoyed taking apart his toys to see how they work. He dropped out of school in grade eight because he didn't enjoy it. But that didn't mean he didn't like to learn. No.
[00:06:00] - [Cassie]
It probably just wasn't enough for him. Instead, he worked as an apprentice for his neighbor who was an auto mechanic. After only a year of apprenticing with his neighbor, he decided to open up his own shop on the farm. And this was about 14 or 15 years old. Right?
[00:06:17] - [Cassie]
Yeah. Just incredible. And that decision to go out on his own venture at that age wasn't teenage hubris. He really was that smart and capable. One way he made money was by selling the special items he fixed up.
[00:06:33] - [Cassie]
Items of historical significance that he would later go on to sell to the province of BC and collectors. He fixed things like locomotives, trucks, airplanes, including a Kitty Hawk from World War two that, after he fixed it, was famously on display in front of a local business in the Duncan area for many years. He also fixed a bulldozer that other mechanics had written off. He later went on to use this bulldozer for projects on the farm and to help neighbors as well. Who doesn't want a neighbor who has a bulldozer and is willing to bring it over to help?
[00:07:12] - [Cassie]
See, a favorite pastime of his was going out into the bush and looking for old abandoned machines. So he was familiar with many of the surrounding wooded areas as a result. One such famous example was the train or locomotive that later ran on his farm. He'd heard about it and that it had been abandoned in the forest. So he brought it back piece by piece to the farm and reworked on it.
[00:07:39] - [Cassie]
He then built tracks for it, and the kids in the area would come and ride the train. The farm started to become a bit of an attraction with all of Granger's projects.
[00:07:49] - [Nina]
It's amazing that he was able to do what he loved on his own terms. He was fortunate to have the pharmacist space to carry out his projects. Granger's intelligence meant he would soon move on to new questions, new things to learn and make sense of. He became intrigued by aerodynamics. So he earned his pilot's license.
[00:08:09] - [Nina]
He got help from neighborhood kids who love learning from Granger. One such neighborhood kid was Robert Keller. Robert was 15 and had dropped out of school. His parents had split up, and he was living with his dad. Robert was turned again into trouble.
[00:08:25] - [Nina]
He was hanging with the wrong crowd. His father was concerned about the direction his life was headed. Granger said he'd have him help out on the farm. Granger would go to Robert's house at 8AM every day and make sure he came. Robert saw it as a punishment at first, but soon he was really enjoying the projects and learning from Granger's brilliance.
[00:08:47] - [Nina]
Granger became like a big brother or best friend to Robert. While some may raise eyebrows at their dynamic, it does seem like it was all innocent. Robert still does interviews about his friend slash role model, Granger Taylor, to this day and speaks so highly of Granger. And he's a key part of how this story carries on today.
[00:09:08] - [Cassie]
So as we've said, Granger was also eccentric. He painted his 1966 Nissan Datsun truck pink. Picture the color of Pepto Bismol. Yeah. That color.
[00:09:22] - [Cassie]
And Robert helped him. And because it was Granger Taylor, no one questioned the color of his truck. That just fit with who Granger was. The genius began to set his sights on new mechanical questions in the late nineteen seventies. He had really gotten into space with the release of the first Star Wars movie in 1977.
[00:09:45] - [Cassie]
Of course, there was the Duncan UFO phenomenon too. Because Duncan isn't just famous for being the smallest city in Canada. For UFO enthusiasts, it's known for a spaceship sighting. Where we're currently at in this story, it's the late nineteen seventies. But let's go back in time further before the release of Star Wars.
[00:10:08] - [Cassie]
It's 5AM New Year's Day nineteen seventy. At the Cowichan District Hospital, a nurse named Doreen Kendall was working in the geriatric wing. She opened the curtains of a patient's room, and hovering there outside was a brightly lit saucer. It had a dome top that appeared to be like glass. Staring at this sight, presumably in shock, she just took in what she was seeing.
[00:10:39] - [Cassie]
There were two figures inside. They resembled men. They appeared to be dressed in dark garb. One figure turned slowly towards her. The other appeared to reach down for something.
[00:10:51] - [Cassie]
And as they grabbed it, it made the machine begin to turn and move away. She called out to a colleague who came up to the window to see, along with two others who followed shortly after. They watched the craft as it moved away without sound. In the days that followed, people talked about a mysterious flying object in the area. Witnesses included a pilot from the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service and elementary school teachers, lending credence to the claims just given their professions.
[00:11:25] - [Cassie]
And then there's the Mount Prevost legends, where the Cowichan people's origin story tells of Stutsun, one of the first of their people to come to Earth, and he landed on Suakus or Mount Prevost.
[00:11:40] - [Nina]
So with these cultural fascinations with aliens at the time, in the late 70s, Granger began construction on his own spaceship. It was built out of two satellite dishes that he scavenged from the dump. Let me paint the spaceship scene for you. This was like his office, his quiet space for thinking and learning. He had created a funky sanctuary for himself.
[00:12:03] - [Nina]
It contained a couch, a TV, and a wood stove. It was full of books about science fiction and UFOs. See, Granger had his sights on a new question. He wanted to figure out how UFOs, such as those flying saucer variety that had been spotted in Duncan, were able to self propel. No engineer in the world had been able to answer this question.
[00:12:26] - [Nina]
He spent a lot of time alone in his spaceship office working on his projects and would also often sleep in there. He began to have repeated dreams of alien contact and about alien abduction. The aliens had introduced themselves telepathically to Grainger through dreams. He built a radio to communicate with the aliens. He thought that given he was willing to communicate with them, that they had chosen him.
[00:12:54] - [Nina]
He asked them several times about how they self propel. And while they wouldn't give a proper answer, they did hint it had to do with magnetism. In the year following up to his disappearance, he talked more and more of the aliens and how they wanted to take him. He believed that the aliens wanted him because of his mechanical abilities, and he said his willingness to communicate with them.
[00:13:20] - [Cassie]
Concerns about Granger were growing with his talk of alien abduction. His mental health was seemingly not great. Granger was known to smoke marijuana, but now he was taking LSD regularly. There was a man living and helping on the farm, and he was said to be a bad influence and was supplying Granger with the LSD, but also potentially taking advantage of him financially. In October 1980, he told Robert and another friend, Bob Nielsen, that the aliens had invited him to travel through the Milky Way galaxy.
[00:13:59] - [Cassie]
They didn't really believe him, but they also did believe that Granger was a genius and somebody who was always reliable. He said that they would come during a massive storm so that they could go undetected. He estimated late November, and he had said that he would make sure to dispose of his truck so no one spent time looking for it. He didn't want people wasting their time looking. He was excited that the aliens were coming for him.
[00:14:30] - [Cassie]
His attitude at the time was that of someone looking forward to something. Then the type of storm Granger had predicted, a storm that many would later call the storm of the century, arrived in Duncan on the night of 11/29/1980. And sometime in the middle of that crazy storm, ranger Taylor had disappeared.
[00:14:58] - [Nina]
And we're going to leave you on that cliffhanger today. Next week, we'll discuss the search for Granger, the clues uncovered, and the theories in his disappearance. Thank you for joining us this episode. New episodes are out every Tuesday. You can reach out to us at info@mishapsandmysteries.ca.
[00:15:18] - [Nina]
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