(water splashing) - [Reporter] Police call it an act of eco-terrorism.

Dozens of SUVs and Humvee's were damaged or spray painted with graffiti.

(gloomy music) - [Speaker] There was a math equation, there were other phrases.

- [Speaker 2] "Fat, lazy American", sure, that's great.

- [Reporter] And a calling card of sorts, the letters ELF and an acronym for the radical Earth Liberation Front.

- [Reporter 2] Members of ELF were caught on surveillance cameras as they torched over a hundred cars at dealerships.

- [Speaker] Concerns about the environment are clear motivators.

Ultimately though, what's in a person's mind and heart when they commit acts like this will remain in their minds.

(gloomy music) (upbeat tapping music) (gloomy music) - We are all from Michigan.

My parents both went to the same high school, and they were high school sweethearts, and are both from here in this small town.

(gloomy music) - So this was always kind of a home to Tyler.

He spent a lot of time camping, and hiking, and a lot of things that became part of him, he learned here I think.

Other things might change, but this always stayed the same.

(gloomy music) - So this is when my dad thought Tyler should look like a grown man to go to kindergarten.

(laughs) With his part and his old man jacket.

We're not gonna talk about what I'm wearing.

(laughs) Yeah, this is in 1991, when you could get your school picture taken like that, with that background, you remember that, pretty cool.

Ah, see this guy?

And then become super nerd.

He realized he wasn't gonna be real tall.

He was always athletic, but he wasn't really big.

So he realized, "Okay, my niche is gonna be academics."

Oh yeah, this is when he worked at the photo store in high school.

And he did not care about his job description so he would just read his textbooks.

He was not good at customer relations.

(gloomy music) - Early on, he had decided he wanted to be a theoretical physicist, a quantum physicist.

(gloomy music) - I remember that was one thing, he was like, "Doesn't matter what you do, but be the best at it."

(gloomy music) - Caltech was his dream school, and they offered him a presidential merit scholarship to come.

And at Caltech, he was at the top of his class.

The CIA and the NSA had approached him to recruit him, and he didn't wanna work in an office decrypting.

He said he couldn't see his life doing that.

He wanted to use math for the benefit of the world and to leave his mark.

(gloomy music) He was really excited because he was going to be getting his PhD, and the world was all charted ahead of him.

(gloomy music) (eerie music) - [Tyler] What would life be without surprises?

I keep the past as a surprise.

This is opposite the usual situation of a fixed past and unpredictable future.

Perhaps this is because I've always felt the future to be predictable enough, that there's not enough room for surprise.

That's what led me to this unpredictable past.

(eerie music) (water splashing) - [Etienne] (speaks French) (gloomy music) - Corsica is a place where people don't ask questions.

(gloomy music) - Corsica could be some piece of Texas lost in the Mediterranean Sea.

- [Etienne] (speaks French) (gloomy music) - We got our own culture, we have been independent.

We are an island of secrets, with also strong tradition of outlaws.

- There's a history about Corsican bandits, if they arrived in the evening, you could never refuse them meal and a night's sleep.

(gloomy music) - (speaks French) (gloomy music) (waves crashing) (leaves rustling and birds chirping) - There was a knock on the door, and Jim answered it, and there were three people that were asking about Tyler.

It wasn't your neighborhood guys stopping by to say hi because they fanned out like military style.

And I think that's when Jim thought, "This is not your usual situation."

He invited them in, and I was upstairs and I heard Jim say, "Patrice, you better come down here."

So when I came downstairs, Jim said, "These men are from the FBI."

And I laughed because I thought he had to be kidding.

But then I saw the looks on their faces, and I could tell no one was kidding.

(eerie music) - My mom sent me an email and it said, "Urgent, when was the last time you talked with Tyler?

"Call me."

And that was such a different tone, I could tell that was serious right away.

My classmate had a phone so I kind of like tapped him and pointed at the screen, and asked him for his phone.

And I fumbled around with it 'cause I was, I think my hands were shaking.

And so I talked to my mom in the hallway, and she told me that the FBI had come to the house, and that Tyler had fled the country.

And then it's like, but this is top secret, we can't talk about it 'cause we don't know what's going on.

(eerie music) - I think everything went into tunnel vision for me, because it was terrifying to think that Tyler was missing.

He told me that Tyler should turn himself in.

And that if he didn't, things like this did not usually turn out well.

(eerie music) - And I give the phone to Ryan, he's like, "Well, they'll find him."

And I was like, "No they won't, you don't understand."

So I knew it was serious and I knew he wasn't gonna be caught if he didn't wanna be caught.

(eerie music) - [Tyler] The plan was simple and unambitious, yet embodied our very last grasp at life itself.

To frugally survive on a remote Mediterranean beaches until we ran out of money.

After which the unspoken assumption was that it would all be over.

(eerie music) (car engines revving) - All he wanted me to know was that he never killed anybody.

He looked very young, and I felt he didn't know exactly where to go, what to do, is totally out of the usual picture of fugitives.

He knew that he was facing 30 years in prison, I think.

This was a theoretical conviction, but the risk was that he was thinking he would need an attorney to defend him.

And he wanted to have details about extradition.

Could he be extradited without a treaty?

Was there a treaty between France and the United States, et cetera.

The usual question that you might expect from a client, in fact.

But I was willing to help him in a way or another.

I decided to offer him to go to Corsica because he was hanging around in Marseille, would be safer for him to go to Corsica.

(eerie music) - [Tyler] Even when reading a book, it's sad to leave the last chapter behind, but we rarely notice because our attention shifts to the upcoming chapter.

It's somewhat different when you are living the story, but the dichotomy still exists.

(eerie music) (ferry engine revving) (car engines revving) - (speaks French) (waves crashing) (speaks French) (waves crashing) (eerie music) - [Tyler] We lived, or at least let the time pass, alone in a giant stone house.

I could escape into my world of mathematics, where painful matters couldn't touch pure abstraction.

(eerie music) She sat thinking about all we had lost, about our lives, dreams, family and friends lost, our future a dark horror.

(eerie music) (gloomy music) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) (gloomy music) - But there was this atmosphere around him which people didn't want to resist him.

There was a kind of a magnetism about him.

(gloomy music) His way of being was free, which is a a contradiction in his actual situation.

(gloomy music) - [Tyler] No towns, no people, hollow stone ruins.

Misfit relics of distant time and long gone civilizations stood watch over windblown eternity, ghosts like us.

Home ceased to exist, and nowhere became everywhere.

(gloomy music) - [Patrice] Of course, you're trying to imagine where he is, and you're trying to imagine his situation.

- You try to help, but there really was very unclear how we could help.

The only solution that we could have for him to see information from us anonymously was to broadcast to the whole web.

So understanding our concern about being surveilled, we even put our home address and cell phone numbers on the website because that's the only way he would've gotten them.

So it's like there's this tension between being very, very private, and then saying, "Here's where we live."

So this is the homepage of my website that was through my University of Michigan domain.

And then this is a picture of back at the lake with our whole family.

And we made signs, it says, "We love and miss you, Tyler."

And then we all signed this, September, 2005.

And then I had these other links to try to somewhat disguise professionally what was going on here, which was the bio and family page.

So this was a poster that we all signed, so this would've been about eight months after he was missing.

Mom wrote, "Tyler, love you always and totally, "be good to yourself, mom."

And I insisted that my dad sign it because it was a hard thing to do.

And he wrote, "You are loved."

One person said, "Come home."

I wrote, "Take care of yourself, bro, love you so much."

(gloomy music) - And we always told each other Tyler was very resourceful, that he would find a way to take care of himself and we'd hear from him someday.

(gloomy music) (eerie music) - [Tyler] I've learned to lift my head up and pull away from the negativity, to fake a smile and continue.

After a while, it starts rolling.

New people and new ideas add positivity and optimism into the mix.

The smile becomes genuine, the future takes on color again.

(upbeat tapping music) - (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) - I don't know why, but I did it.

I had an old house in Corsica.

The house was empty, I mean, it would be more comfortable for him to go.

(upbeat tapping music) - (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) (eerie music) - [Tyler] Everything remains unknown as before, but now I'm capable of answering what I want from life.

I want math, I wanna see my friends and family again, and I want to sail into atolls and uninhabited islands, to watch the sunset and to hear the waves.

(eerie music) (gloomy music) - The first time we heard from him was with a physical letter that came in the mail to my grad school office.

Because he knew where I was applying, and the university's website listed the names of the new graduate students.

So he would've probably looked at all of the different schools that I was applying to, to find out where I was.

So he was able to find my work address basically, and email it with no return address, of course.

(gloomy music) It was like a gift to see the envelope and to think, is this what I think it is?

(gloomy music) And I opened it, and in fact, it was a letter from Tyler.

And it was kind of a collapse, kind of a release, of okay, it's been a year.

We never got a goodbye or any heads up this was coming, so this was the first word from him.

(gloomy music) It was a lot of emotions, relief, disbelief but also like a jewel, like holding a gem, something precious.

(gloomy music) I came out to show them, but wanted to do it very discreetly so that it wouldn't be surveilled.

We would assume also the house would be bugged.

So we met in a parking lot of a store.

- And she showed me the letter, and it was just, it was amazing.

It was wonderful and horrible at the same time, because you could tell his heart was breaking, but he was alive, and he said not to worry about him, which of course you do.

But it was a great weight that was lifted off us then, but we still didn't know where he was, and he couldn't let us know.

(gloomy music) So I think this was his first letter home.

And this was a hard line here.

"All I've got are tears that can't dry "and wishes that can't come true.

"I love you all very, very much."

(gloomy music) (leaves rustling and birds chirping) - (speaks French) (chiming music) (speaks French) - It consisted in making tools or gear to boil water with no other resource than the sunlight.

(chiming music) - (speaks French) (chiming music) (speaks French) (chiming music) (speaks French) (chiming music) (eerie music) - [Tyler] One of the advantages of swerving in and out of the world at all levels, is to be able to pick out little tidbits of beautiful functionality from a great waste of the machine.

(eerie music) (waves crashing) - We are all islands.

The only way you can really come close to somebody is just hold out your hand.

And then your two islands come closer, and then things can start happening.

I was working on this social boat building project, restoring old fishing boats here in Ajaccio.

One afternoon, I think it was, he crossed over the courtyard, and it was amazing immediate sensation that that was somebody different.

There was something strong in the air.

And he said, "It'd be nice to have a kind of a workshop."

And I said, "Well, use it, it's empty."

We were working on Olivier's boat.

Olivier Baussan is the creator of L' Occitane.

L' Occitane is a very well known mark of natural beauty projects, et cetera.

Olivier came to see his boat.

And I churched away for about 15 minutes.

In the 15 minutes, they got together a project, Olivier with his foundation, L' Occitane Foundation, was going to finance, take the mirrors down to a certain village down in Africa.

Olivier had all the contacts, and Mark made the connection, it was done.

(eerie music) - [Tyler] These were the times when I held the ideals, the dreams and the passions from before.

I had lost much on the outside, but I was still the same Tyler on the inside.

(eerie music) - Among this close world of kind of hobo, kind of hikers, he became sort of legend.

- (speaks French) - You have conquered everyone of the Pikes of more than 6,000 feet, nobody does that here.

(breeze howling) - (speaks French) (breeze howling) (speaks French) (eerie music) - [Tyler] In nature, I feel a brotherhood with a surrounding life.

They are struggling to survive just as I am.

Here, the buses and cinder blocks are ghosts who've given up the struggle, I'm somewhere in between.

(eerie music) (gloomy music) - We saved the envelopes, this one came from Norge, probably Norway, I suppose.

And here's the letter that's from France.

And that was in '08, November of '08.

This one, I think, I'm not sure where that one was from.

(gloomy music) Seems like I checked it out to Romania or something.

At one time I Googled a person's name on the stamp.

He didn't dare right regularly, but he did write once a year, usually after Christmas.

Yeah, the holidays he wrote were always the hardest for him.

And I think he knew that they were the hardest for us too.

So I think he also probably looked at it mathematically and figured that the post office was processing so many letters at that time that the chances of detection would be less.

He had this code, and here's the code, he'd put first this.

Then he explained how we could use it.

"Only use this if you are very confident "it hasn't been observed by a third party."

(gloomy music) I would spend hours every night going line by line through each of his letters, trying to apply the description code, thinking, well maybe he had a message in there with just an email address.

(gloomy music) I would get spam, and a lot of those ones, I used to say, "I think this is Tyler."

(gloomy music) I wanted to try to respond to those emails so I kept a list of 'em, and then I would go into a a library.

Well, I'd put on my baseball cap, and walk to a library, and sneak in, and I'd send messages, I'd reply to those.

And then the next time I'd go back in, I'd enter more and I'd check the ones.

(gloomy music) One and one, and two and two, or one and three.

I don't know.

(gloomy music) I tried every angle.

(gloomy music) (eerie music) (indistinct muttering) - [Tyler] Constructing and persisting in illusions inescapably produces long-term discontinuities.

And I had heaps.

(eerie music) (upbeat tapping music) - The way of life if you're a fugitive is always paranoid, and I think he had reasons to be.

(motorcycle engine revving) - (speaks French) - Never used internet.

And when he used internet, it was from a remote computer in a web cafe or whatever.

- (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (speaks French) (upbeat tapping music) (car engines revving) (chiming music) - [Stephane] He had this Solaria organization.

(chiming music) It was giving a sense to his life.

(chiming music) - (speaks French) (chiming music) (speaks French) (chiming music) (speaks French) (chiming music) (water splashing) (speaks French) (chiming music) (speaks French) (insects chirping) (speaks French) (upbeat eerie music) - They discovered that Mark Sisson was Tyler Johnson.

A young man pursued by the FBI for arsons in California.

(upbeat eerie music) - Actions of August 22nd, an act of violence, the fire bombings was used in order to try to sway public opinion or government policy.

That in and of itself essentially fits the definition of domestic terrorism.

(upbeat eerie music) Concerns about the environment are clear motivators.

(upbeat eerie music) - (speaks French) (upbeat eerie music) (speaks French) (upbeat eerie music) - (speaks French) (eerie music) - (speaks French) (eerie music) (speaks French) (eerie music) - (speaks French) (eerie music) (speaks French) (eerie music) (speaks French) (eerie music) (speaks French) (eerie music) - [Tyler] For good or bad, I find myself unable to let go of the past.

I see the past everywhere, even in the future.

Well, at first I was really living in the present, now I'm almost blind to the present.

(eerie music) Dreams of the past or a past-like future act like a cage for my mind.

Perhaps by letting go I could free myself.

Am I afraid to let go, maybe.

(eerie music) (soft upbeat tapping music) - I remember that I led him a message.

"Call me back, I had good news."

It was already four years that he was going back and forth in Corsica.

We happened to have a confirmation that the FBI never sent any arrest warrant, no request, no Interpol note to France in order to get him back to the United States.

(soft upbeat tapping music) He looked in the first place disappointed.

I mean, he didn't react immediately.

And then it was like the importance of his case was less than he expected.

It was very curious, he should have been very happy about that, but it was not the case.

I mean, he looked disappointed.

(soft upbeat tapping music) Life is not epic, and dreaming of an epic fate is not the way to find happiness.

(soft upbeat tapping music) (eerie music) - [Tyler] I've been confined in this island for longer than I care to remember.

Still trapped today, longing for my country, for my family and all left behind.

I no longer recognize my voice in my maternal language.

(eerie music) My people are away, and I would give a kidney to rejoin them.

(eerie music) - (speaks French) - There were mountains here, he'd climbed them.

He hadn't done the GR20, which is a very popular, in summer, walk from one end of the island to the other, but up on the highest, highest mountains.

And he decided to do it at Christmas.

(stream flowing and birds chirping) (eerie music) - [Tyler] I find no asylum here, nor the means to return.

Over time, I retreat further and further.

The world pulls away from me increasingly.

The silence is my cry for help.

(rain drops pelting) - (speaks French) (rain drops pelting) (speaks French) (rain drops pelting) (speaks French) (rain drops pelting) (speaks French) (rain drops pelting) (speaks French) (rain drops pelting) (speaks French) (rain drops pelting) (bird chirping) - [Speaker 3] (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) (eerie music) - [Tyler] Soon I was back at the refuge d'Asco, steaming before the fire.

(eerie music) I'm wondering what I'm doing, why am I digging at open wounds, what time is it in Michigan?

(eerie music) - It's early January, and I get a text from my mom, says, "We're in your apartment, "just want you to know everything's fine, see you soon."

And I'm thinking, oh, this is not good.

I figured this had to do with Tyler.

(birds chirping) - [Rescuer] (speaks French) - (speaks French) - [Rescuer] (speaks French) - (speaks French) - [Rescuer] (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) - (speaks French) (eerie music) - [Tyler] I've become a master of just not thinking about painful subjects.

An escape, a self drugging of purely psychological manner, yet effective, essential medication for what is called man's worst enemy, his memory.

(eerie music) - So on the very last days of December, 2009, he left the place where he was staying for a bit of hiking in the mountains, in the Monte Cinto.

(eerie music) - [Julia] (speaks French) - (speaks French) (eerie music) - Then he followed this way up to Monte Cinto, but he disappeared.

(eerie music) - (speaks French) (eerie music) - (speaks French) (eerie music) - (speaks French) - I don't think it enters into his thinking.

It was, "I'm gonna be up there on my own.

"It's gonna be fantastic, it's gonna be snow.

"It's gonna be amazing views."

Without considering the fact that, oh, yes, but have you got, are you equipped for, do you think of.

No, it's gonna be fantastic, I'm sure it was.

(eerie music) - [Rescuer] (speaks French) (eerie music) - So the French consulate called, and he said that they thought they had found Tyler's body and they wondered if we could provide them dental records to confirm.

- They're in my apartment, I get home, and my mom tells me that Tyler died.

I was like, that was my fear.

- We just had to get to Corsica as fast as we could get there.

When we got there all Tyler's friends, and Stephane and his family welcomed us.

- And really just swooped around us and took care of us.

basically taking us on a tour of all the places Tyler went, and liked, and being so kind.

- One of his friends' cabins up in the mountains on the upper loft part, we found a box that had his journals in it.

(eerie music) - We got information that we have been missing for six years.

What is going on, what is his life like?

(eerie music) He wasn't anonymous in the sense of being alone.

He had made a life, it was just not at all what we expected.

Yeah.

(eerie music) - Life is not epic.

Epic music in documentaries is always artificial.

(eerie music) Dreaming of an epic fate is not the way to find happiness.

(eerie music) - [Tyler] I will be an old man someday.

I will have the memory of glowing particles of dust swimming about the room made bright by the sun in a house near Chelsea, Michigan.

- (speaks French) (smooth guitar music) - [Tyler] I will remember periods spent floating on love, as one would on a cloud or idealism.

At times, seeing the world as it should and could be.

(smooth guitar music) - (speaks French) - [Tyler] I will remember the fall, striking the hard world below because clouds have the tendency to evaporate.

(smooth guitar music) - (speaks French) (smooth guitar music) - [Tyler] Yes, I will be an old man someday, but now I am young.

(sings in French)