Mark Rober's muse was a package thief.
Two package thieves, to be exact, both of whom had made off with a delivery from his California porch one day in broad daylight, about seven months ago.
Indignant, Rober — a former NASA engineer who runs a popular YouTube channel documenting his many quirky science experiments — started thinking about how he could apprehend the porch pirates. Though he had caught the thieves on his security cameras, Rober said police had told him it was not worth their time to look into.
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Rober decided he would create a booby trap inspired by his "childhood hero and inspiration" Kevin McAllister, the young and resourceful protagonist (played by Macaulay Culkin) in the "Home Alone" films of the 1990s.
With the help of friends, Rober mocked up a design for his ideal trap: It would be disguised as a package — specifically, a cellophane-wrapped Apple HomePod box he knew would be "enticing" for any porch pirate. It would be GPS-enabled, so he could track its journey once it left his home perimeter. It would record video with embedded cellphones, no matter how the thief picked up the parcel.
And, once triggered, it would be glittery. So glittery.
"Ultimately, when they opened the package, I wanted to celebrate their choice of profession with a cloud of glitter," Rober said.
One pound of glitter, that is. To add insult to injury, Rober also built in a can of "fart spray," programmed to automatically spray after the glitter explosion was triggered.
"No joke, you can clear a room with one spray of this stuff," Rober said.
For the specifics of how Rober engineered his smelly "glitter bomb," we turn to the YouTube video he created documenting the project:
Kinda surprised how many people stole a parcel from a single location.
