It was the evening of November 29, 1980, when Canadian Granger Ormond Taylor, born on October 7, 1948, left his farm at Duncan (Vancouver, Canada), where he lived with his parents, after writing a short message.

The message read: “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”.

Not death but a departure

Many more months passed that just 42 as imagined Granger, who never came back to his farm at Duncan, nor did he ever send any news to his parents or his best friend Robert Keller, who still doesn't know whether he should wait for his return or cry for death.

To be true, Granger canceled the word “death” in his will, replacing it with the word “departure”. According to a local newspaper, The Time Colonist, Granger sketched a sort of map on the back of the message, but no one has ever understood the meaning.

Granger was obsessed by space

The last time he was seen Granger was at a diner not far from his farm, at 6:30 pm, then no one ever saw him nor his bright pink Datsun pick-up (certainly not a car that can go unnoticed), despite police investigations.

According to Keller and other friends, Granger with the years had developed a real obsession with space, coming to build a life-size replica spaceship in the farmyard.

A life marked by a tragic accident

“He sometimes slept in” remembers Keller, according to who his friend “did have dreams that aliens were coming to get him”. Shy and quiet in contrast to his imposing figure, when Granger was a child he had been orphaned by his father, drowned in an accident near the family farm on Horn Lake.

An event that marked Granger for the rest of his life but that did not stop him once dropped out of school to become a good mechanic, with the uncanny ability to fix almost anything, from an old steam locomotive to a Second World War's fighter, a P-40 Kitty Hawk which was later sold to a collector.

A genius bordering on insanity

Many thought he was eccentric, if not totally crazy, but Keller always believed him to be “a genius bordering on insanity”. The idea to build a life-size replica spaceship came to him in the 1970s.

To succeed, he used spare parts, equipped it with television, a sofa and a wood stove inside. According to another friend, Bob Nielson, Granger almost a month, before vanishing would have revealed that he was in contact with the aliens.

Mental contact with aliens

“He lay there and got mental communications with somebody from another galaxy” referred Nielson to The Time Colonist, adding that “he couldn't see them, they were just talking to him and his mind."

Nielsen added that most people thought Taylor was just dreaming all this up. Some witnesses of family members, particularly a letter written by Granger's cousin, Jaclyn Sandiford, to her mother, reported the use of drugs: “They [his friends, ed] said Granger did quite a bit of acid through the summer, but had no bad trips and did not [experience, ed] any ill effects”.

Was Granger strained on Lsd?

The conviction of being in touch with aliens could be related to the abuse of acid: “They told me - added Granger's cousin - that he frequently spoke about being in some kind of mental contact with an alien. They said he so matter-of-fact about it that they were, too. He told them he would be leaving soon a day or two before he did”.

In conclusion, would Taylor Granger have been just a boy with some problems, stray of drugs and run away from home? The only thing we know is that six years after his "departure" local forestry workers found a blast site near Mount Prevost, not far from Granger's farm, with human bone fragments on the scene.

Granger was used to transporting dynamite, so for the police, the case is solved and Granger is probably dead in the explosion. But was it all true that he sustained and the blast was just a way of losing all his tracks forever?