They call him ‘Bear Man’

Story, photo, Rob Learn

He’s arguably North Bay’s most famous resident. In fact, since Mike Harris left town for the Big Smoke he’s probably more inarguable than arguable.

But fame and fortune don’t go hand in hand, as Troy Hurtubise can tell you.

The star of the classic Canadian documentary by director Peter Lynch, Project Grizzly, never did manage to convert that fame or his driven, focused attention into something he would call success.

As an inventor, Hurtubise was proud to have one of his prized creations – a special suit designed to withstand an aggressive grizzly bear attack – featured in a documentary. Unfortunately, the success of the film didn’t translate into acclaim for the inventor.

Now almost 50, Hurtubise lives in North Bay in a small rental cabin on the Lake Nipissing shoreline with his wife Lori and 18-year-old son Brett, and is still looking for that break.

More than 14 years after he rose to fame, Hurtubise hasn’t sit still for a moment. What he has done is thrown himself into one project after another. Each endeavour has had varying degrees of success in execution he says, but always the same result – no interested buyers and crushing bills.

“We lost the house in 2005 and we’ve been around ever since,” says Hurtubise, who notes that the hard luck started even before then.

“I went bankrupt six months after the documentary came out,” says Hurtubise who, during the time of filming, was operating a scrap metal business.

“I knew before they started filming that (the documentary) was going to cost me big time. While I’m out doing this testing and going out west there was no one to run the business and it all went downhill,” he says.

But what footage!

To this day, clips of Hurtubise testing out his suit dubbed the Ursus Mark VI are some of the most viewed on the Internet. A decade-and-a-half later and each new generation gawks in awestruck wonder as Troy, inside the suit, takes blows from pickaxes, axe handle-wielding bikers, logs and even a pretty high-speed impact from a reinforced pickup truck. Through online streaming, Hurtubise’s death-defying feats make him just as popular now as he was when the film hit screens to wild acclaim in 1996.

“I understand why it went huge, why it was Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movie. I get that. Peter Lynch was a brilliant filmmaker…(Project Grizzly) set me back for a lot of years. Most people thought it was a joke.”

Hurtubise says it wasn’t. He says the intention of the suits was to do actual field testing of bear sprays to see what works and what doesn’t stop the brute force of a 900 lb grizzly intent on doing someone harm.

“I’m the only one who tests it on free range grizzly bears…that’s not what you got. What you got was me running around the Rocky Mountains trying to wrestle grizzly bears and not the science,” says Hurtubise.

Wife Lori says she liked Project Grizzly, but says she sees a character on the screen and not the man she married.

“I think they portrayed him much different than the man he is. For instance he’s constantly smoking in the movie. Every scene it seems he’s got a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke that much.”

What Lynch and the National Film Board got was a big hit. The documentary was already out on the big screen when Tarantino, at the height of his fame after Pulp Fiction’s blockbuster run, dubbed it his favourite film. The quip let Project Grizzly gain momentum and a star was born in a giant suit of armour.

“People think just cause your famous you’ve got a lot money. You don’t. I didn’t get one dime from that,” says Hurtubise, though he did make some money doing appearances on American talk shows and in consultant fees that he was always throwing into the next project.

That next project, after Project Grizzly, would be the final bear suit dubbed the Mark VII. Hurtubise says the suit was revolutionary compared to its forerunner because of a change in design that split the top piece in two vertically.

“NASA didn’t even have anything like this. Here’s this huge impervious suit and I could put it on by myself. It was revolutionary,” he says.

It also wasn’t enough to pay the bills. The Hurtubises lost their first home in 2001 and the suit went with it.

It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself again and again, with what many would deem to be mind-blowing projects that seem to fall through his hands like sand.

Troy Hurtubise says he was only supposed to be visiting North Bay for a week on his way to British Columbia when he met Lori.

“Me and my brother go to the Country Style Donuts and sat down next to the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She says, ‘I wonder if the movie [Dances with Wolves] is an accurate portrayal of the book,’ and I had seen the movie so I open my mouth and the next thing you know I’m 20 years married to this woman who won’t leave North Bay.”

During the interview she sits back and lets her husband carry on with his rapid-fire style of talking that goes through peaks and valleys – sitting back one moment and building his momentum until he’s at the edge of his seat, eyes focused.

Over the two-hour interview he doesn’t lose that intensity as he describes the many projects he’s worked on over the past decade.

They include Angel Light, which he claims could see through walls, the ground, even clothing and flesh to look at the bones and internal organs of a person’s body.

That one, Hurtubise says he gave up because of side effects that included heavy vomiting; his hair started to fall out and he lost 30 lbs of weight in about two weeks.

But news of the discovery, says Hurtubise, spread and he soon had a German physicist making inquiries and then suggestions about how to develop the Angel Light. During the phoned-in augmentations the device went from being portable to being about 26 feet long. Hurtubise dubbed it the Godlight.

Hurtubise says the light from the machine, the Godlight, had an almost magical power and that he says, cured one person of Parkinson’s disease, another of Alzheimer’s and two cases of breast cancer.

“It didn’t even need to be that intense of a treatment. Two ten-minute sessions and they were cured,” says Hurtubise, who doesn’t recall the names of the patients he helped.

The Godlight befell the same fate, says Hurtubise, as his other inventions. In 2005 shortly after inventing it and trying to get it noticed, the Hurtubises lost their second home. He put the Godlight machine in storage, but when he couldn’t pay the bill, the facility’s owner threw the cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and breast cancer into the local landfill.

“Angry? You couldn’t believe it,” says Hurtubise. “If only they had given it a chance the world would be a better place today.”

Another invention is Firepaste that Hurtubise claims almost completely stops the transfer of heat and is much more impervious than the product used by NASA on its shuttle missions.

In fact, Hurtubise says he created Firepaste after the Columbia disaster in 2003.

“I studied for 12 hours on the Internet what the top fire resistant materials were in the world and then I spent three hours of trial and error mixing them and I had Firepaste,” says Hurtubise.

Firepaste’s lack of success, says Hurtubise is that industry and science don’t want to give credit to a man working out of his house without hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, let alone any formal science education.

“How the hell can he do it?’ That’s the answer you get when you show them this stuff,” says Hurtubise.

His latest inventions are inspired by his younger brother Blair’s service in the Canadian military in Afghanistan.

One set is armour for vehicles that can either be attached to the outside in magnetic bags or set inside the body of the vehicle to ward off improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades and other deadly fire.

The second is a full-body exterior-skeleton suit, including full head protection that is inspired by the futuristic shoot-’em-up games popular amongst the video gaming population.

“It weighs 65 lbs. It’s a full-body armour. Not only will it cold stop a bullet, but it won’t cause blunt force trauma… it can take a 50-calibre bullet to the chest,” says Hurtubise.

Certainly the videos of Hurtubise testing out the suit look compelling. Men and women fire at close range with large handguns, shotguns and more at his creation, with ballistic clay behind it showing no sign of trauma leaking through.

But like the other creations, Hurtubise doesn’t have it either. He sent it to a lab in Ottawa for testing to convince the military to take a look at it.

Although he has some pieces of it left, Hurtubise says the rest has been blown to smithereens.

And while he may not have any other suits he built, the devices he’s created or any accolades for his achievements, Hurtubise does have the devotion of his family.

They appear unwavering in their faith that his maverick style of living is going to get them where they need to go.

Lori does work to support the family and Brett is getting ready to make decisions about his own life. Hurtubise says he can’t go to work, that it isn’t in his nature. “If I had to go work for the man after three days I’d just blow my brains out.”

Right now he’s in the midst of writing a second book about his life. He’s found a publisher and hopes to have it on the street before Christmas rolls around. The working title is The Bear Man. And while it will certainly look at his exploits and the lean times that have come in their pursuit, there are some big moments in his life.

For instance, Lori says she doesn’t get out much, but when the subject of Project Grizzly comes up she is able to rhyme off a pretty impressive list of celebrities that she and her husband have gotten to rub shoulders with.

She’s also enjoyed taking trips to Harvard University where Hurtubise has twice lectured after winning the 1998 Ig Nobel Award for safety engineering for the Mark VI.

That suit has a special place in the newly opened Toronto International Film Festival Bell Lightbox Theatre in downtown Toronto. The suit is behind glass in a proper display after the festival was able to buy it off one of the bankruptcy trustees for $2,500. Hurtubise estimates he spent $50,000 building it.

“That’s the most famous of all my suits. At least it’s in a good place,” says the inventor.

And there’s probably another suit in Troy Hurtubise yet.

“I’ve been hit by logs, run over by trucks and bulldozers…pfft. It’s all second nature to me now.”