In the early 1980s, Troy Hurtubise was hiking through the dense Canadian wilderness of Ontario when he stumbled into a close encounter with a massive male grizzly bear. The encounter was terrifying, but it left him with an unusual obsession: he decided that he wanted to study a wild grizzly up close, poke it with a stick, and survive to tell the tale.
To do that, he needed armor.
Over the next decade, Hurtubise poured his life savings and thousands of hours into engineering a walking fortress. Dubbed the Ursus Mark VI, the suit was built from high-impact titanium, galvanized steel, rubber, chainmail, and high-density foam, weighing over 150 pounds.
Before testing the suit against an actual grizzly, Hurtubise subjected himself to some of the most unhinged safety trials ever recorded on home video.
To simulate a bear attack, he paid friends and family to inflict extreme violence on him while he stood in his armor:
He had friends smash heavy wooden baseball bats against his helmet until the bats shattered.
He stood in an empty field while an associate rammed him head-on with an eighteen-wheel truck at 30 miles per hour, sending him bouncing across the dirt like a rubber ball.
He had heavy logs and swinging concrete blocks hurled directly into his chest.
He climbed inside a wooden barrel and rolled down a rocky mountain cliff.
Incredibly, the armor absorbed the punishment. Hurtubise walked away from every single stunt with barely a bruise, though his bank account was completely drained.
When he finally shipped his massive suit out to the wilderness of British Columbia to confront real grizzlies, fate played an ironic joke. The bears took one look at the metallic, clanking monolith stomping through the woods, got spooked by the strange metal giant, and ran away into the trees.
Hurtubise never got his hand-to-hand fight with a wild bear, but his wild home-movie testing footage earned him the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for safety engineering, turning him into a cult legend of fearless eccentric science.
Spending your life savings to build a 150-pound suit of armor, getting hit by a semi-truck just to test the padding, only to have the apex predator run away from you is peak human dedication. That marks a milestone at Day 20 of Crazy History Facts!
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