Ex-NASA engineer creates glitter bomb to trick thieves — VIDEO

“Porch pirates” are in for a messy awakening the next time they steal a package off of Mark Rober’s porch.

According to CNN, Rober, a former NASA engineer who worked on the Mars Curiosity rover, put his engineering skills to good use after having a package stolen from his doorstep.

“If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me,” he said in a now-viral YouTube video.

And that is just what he did.

After six months of work, Rober created a decoy package that contained a pound of sparkly, multicolored glitter, “fart spray” and four cellphones to record the thieves’ reactions and track the packages.

In the event that he couldn’t recover the packages, the cellphone videos would automatically be uploaded to the cloud so he could still see the thieves’ reactions when they got sprayed by the glitter.

In order to make the item look like a legitimate package, Rober even included a false shipping label that noted the sender of the package was “Kevin McCallister,” aka Macaulay Culkin’s character in the movie “Home Alone.”

Now that the package was complete, it was time to set the item outside and wait for a thief to steal it.

It didn’t take long for the package to be taken. The thief, who proudly opened the stolen package in his vehicle, was less than thrilled when glitter soon decorated every nook and cranny of his car’s interior.

But he wasn’t the only thief who had a chance to experience the glitter bomb. Rober was courteous enough to lend his package to a few friends who had also had packages stolen.

Needless to say, the reactions of the unsuspecting thieves were priceless.

Contact Caitlin Lilly at clilly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @caitielilly_ on Twitter.