Riddle Wrapped in a Sleeping Bag

“He was a con artist, but boy, he pulled it off,” Queeney said. “The man was truly a riddle wrapped in a sleeping bag. I don’t know if any of us will ever know who he really was.”

So ends an Associated Press (AP) report, published on January 3, 2004, about the man who would still be alive today had he heeded the example set by Troy Hurtubise. Troy is the inventor who spent seven years building and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears. This won Troy the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of Safety Engineering.

Read our recent report about the man who, unlike Troy, proudly refused to wear any kind of grizzly-proof garments here.

See the entire even-more-recent AP report (the one quoted above) about that same gentleman, here.

And should that not slake your interest in the general subject of people who did not learn what Troy would gladly have taught them, consider this description of another former bear enthusiast; it was published in the January 1, 2004, issue of the Los Angeles Times and then reprinted elsewhere:

Vitaly Nikolayenko, one of Russia’s best-known bear researchers and a man who spent 25 years living with the enormous brown bears of the wild Kamchatka peninsula, has been found dead in an apparent bear mauling, authorities said Tuesday.

Read that entire report here.