This Former NASA Engineer Just Spent Six Months Designing the Glitter Bomb of Nightmares

December 18, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

Mark Rober used to work at NASA and helped design the Curiosity Rover, but he left that job to pursue a higher calling: glitter bombing people who steal packages from his front porch.

Rober, who is now a YouTube star, was getting frustrated that delivery packages were getting stolen from his front porch, so he came up with a way to deter the people who were doing it. Over a painstaking six months of development, Rober figured out a way to douse the would-be robbers in glitter and fart spray—and capture the whole thing on camera.

Of course, there are easier ways of catching a thief than engineering your own glitter and fart spray bomb. Other consumers have simply ordered spring-loaded glitter bombs online to catch thieves, but where is the fun in that?

Ronson said he was inspired to make the package by the Christmas movie, Home Alone, and filled out the fake shipping label on the package similar to Macaulay Culkin’s character Kevin McCallister (he even looked up the actual address of the house used in the film) to Harry and Marv, the robbers.

Package theft is no laughing matter though. Last year, almost 1 in 5 U.S. homeowners were victims of “porch piracy”.