Ex-NASA engineer builds glitter bomb for revenge on package thieves

Source: The Hill | December 18, 2018 | Morgan Gstalter

A former engineer at NASA has developed an exploding glitter bomb to get revenge on thieves stealing packages from his front porch.

Mark Rober, 38, worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for nine years and now produces YouTube videos for his 4.4 million subscribers.

Rober posted a video on Monday detailing how he spent six month making the package after someone stole his mail in May. The video had been viewed more than 7 million times as of Tuesday morning.

Nearly one-third of Americans say they’ve had a package stolen from outside their house, according to a survey last year from Xfinity Home. 

Police told Rober after the theft that it wasn’t something they could look into at the time, he said.

“So then you also feel powerless,” Rober said. “And I just felt like something needs to be done to take a stand against dishonest punks like this.”

The package was designed to look like an Apple HomePod speaker but actually contained four concealed smartphones that record the thief’s reaction from every angle.

The phones would upload the footage to a cloud so that Rober could recover the recording even if he never got the package back.

The box, however, has a built-in GPS locator and accelerometer that triggered the phones to start recording when the box was moved.

The package contained some extra surprises for the thief, including a motor to explode some of the “world’s finest glitter” and an automatic spray-can of “fart spray.”

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Rober was at work when he received a notification from the GPS system that the package had been picked up and was relocated to a parking garage nearby.

He said he was completely out of his comfort zone as he drove to the garage and recovered the now-abandoned package among remnants of glitter.

Video from Rober’s front porch captured the thief taking the package from his porch and getting into his car.

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