ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
Glitterbomb 3.0: BYU alumni and former NASA engineer’s plot to foil porch pirates
Dec 17, 2020, 7:17 AM | Updated: 7:42 am
After having a package stolen from his porch in 2018, Mark Rober felt like he had to take a stand against dishonest punks that make off with things that aren’t there. So he made the first glitterbomb.
Filled with a pound of fine biodegradable glitter and a bottle rigged to dispense spritzes of incredibly pungent “fart spray” Rober’s decoy package was way more than what would be thieves were bargaining for.
That first video gained more than 85 million views and every year since Rober, who is a BYU alumni and former NASA and Apple engineer, has improved on that initial design.
This year, his latest creation added more glitter, more fart spray and even more tech inside his dummy packages.
This year Rober said he went for a Cybertruck esthetic for the inner workings and added a fairly complex custom controller inside the package that could give instructions to four smartphones that recorded the thieves’ reactions no matter what way the package was opened.
Nearly all of the porch pirates who stole the fake package of BuzzBuds opened them in their home, and every one of them had to deal with the aftermath.
Rober said he hopes that the glitterbomb make thieves think twice before making off with someone else’s packages.
In addition to his pirate foiling packages, Rober also created a viral obstacle course to keep the squirrels in his back yard entertained. He was also one of the driving forces behind a massive online fundraiser that raised over $20 million dollars to plant 20 million trees around the globe.
