Troy Hurtubise from North Bay, Ontario first came to fame with the documentary Project Grizzly which chronicled his work to create a bear proof suit spurned on by his fascination with bears. Fortunately, this bear documentary didn’t end up with his girlfriend and him being mauled to death, instead he has gone through several iterations of this bear suit culminating in the “Trojan” which he announced early this year.
The Tojan’s feature list is as follows:
The Trojan incorporates 16 different electronic functions and prototypes impregnated into its exoskeleton. Some of the Trojans key features are a laser tracking system, 5 L.E.D. light spectrums, a voice recorder, a voice activated pedometer, a digital electronic compass, built in compartments for salt tablets and morphine pills, a digital thermometer, a built in intake cooling fan which runs on solar power, a throwing and knife, a medical emergency light transponder and much more.
Below is the evolution of his bear suits, as you can see the suit has come a long way:
Sadly, just weeks after announcing the new suit, Troy went bankrupt after failing to raise additional financing or find any buyers. Troy has been forced to sell the prototype on ebay and as of this writing has reached CAN41,000.
I’m very surprised by this as I would have thought there would be a great amount of demand from Police and Military forces around the world. The consensus from what I’ve read appears to be that while Troy is very eccentric and some of his inventions sound a bit far fetched, his suit has proven to be as effective as he claims. It would be a shame if eccentricities were what got in the way of the suits success.