So I left my power armor at the power armor crafting bench because I didn't want to use any more of the fusion cell, I went out to the town and after a number of hours of scavenging and editing Sanctuary I noticed the power armor was gone. I reloaded to several saves and it was gone much earlier than I realized. So I'm basically going to have to start over.

I'm not the only one with this issue, someone else on reddit had the same problem. The title of the post is: "I lost my power armor... ?"

NOTE: Before I noticed it was gone I did see that the mechanic guy (forgot name) was all warped out with distended limbs and larger limbs too. It looked very weird. Later when I found out that the armor was missing I went and talked to him and it was glitches out and all I was saying to him was "Can you get out of that power armor?" So this leads me to believe he put it on, then for some reason it just kind of glitched off of him?

Let me just confirm that another post on reddit has been made about this. They have confirmed to see Garvey run around all warped apparently in a power armor suit just like I experienced. So Sanctuary NPC's can enter your power armor suits and then gitch it to disappear after a period of time. That's pretty critical.