Mark Rober and Macaulay Culkin Improve the Porch Pirate Glitter Bomb Trap
The former NASA engineer is back with a new version of his famous Home Alone-inspired Glitter Bomb to fight package thieves.
Everyone hates package thieves. That’s why Mark Rober’s Glitter Bomb Trap, which he presented exactly a year ago, was such a big hit. It was designed to look like a legitimate — and very enticing — parcel, but actually contained a glitter bomb, a camera to capture the flamboyant explosion and subsequent humiliation, and a GPS tracker for recovery afterwards. Rober’s original video has been viewed more than 77 million times, and now he’s back with a new and improved version of the Glitter Bomb Trap that he built with the help of Sean Hodgins and none other than Macaulay Culkin himself.
The original Glitter Bomb Trap was heavily-inspired by the movie Home Alone, and even featured a number of obvious clues that perceptive thieves would have noticed, such as the delivery address being that of the McCallister home. So it was only fitting that Macaulay Culkin himself come to help with this new version, which also gave him a chance to promote his lifestyle website bunnyears.com. With the world’s greatest prankster along for the ride, Rober set out to improve on the original Glitter Bomb design.
The new version has many of the same features as its predecessor, all of which are triggered when the package thief opens the box. A gratuitous amount of ultra-fine glitter is launched by a motorized mechanism and noxious fart spray is shot out numerous times. Four smartphones capture video from every angle, and monitor the GPS location of the package. Those phones all have LTE connections, so the data is being streamed in real time. Of course, there are some new features as well. A few choice audio recordings from Home Alone add to the fun, a countdown unnerves the thieves by leading up to absolutely nothing, and fake police radio chatter convinces them that authorities are hot on their trail.
The fake package was dressed up to look like a pair of high-end Bose headphones in order to make it irresistible. Rober than recruited a number of people to place the honeypot package on their porches, and waited for the fun to start. While many people were kind and repositioned the package to hide, others weren’t so altruistic. The bait package got stolen a number of times, and the thieves’ reactions were caught on video. If you’ve ever had a package stolen from your porch, this video is going to be extremely satisfying for you to watch.