Turns out that part of the incredibly popular glitter-bomb-with-fart spray video was faked, and the BYU grad who invented it has apologized and removed about 90 seconds of the footage.
Mark Rober, who came up with the device he placed inside a fake package left to tempt thieves, said he was unaware that two of the five reaction shots were not genuine. In a statement posted on Twitter, he said that he had offered money to people who were willing to put the package in front of their homes and retrieve the device after it was taken and dumped; that a “friend of a friend” agreed to help; and that — after online criticism questioned the video’s veracity — he learned that in two of the five reaction shots in the original video, “the ‘thieves’ were actually acquaintances of the person helping me.”
The video, which has been been shortened from more than 11 minutes to 9:40, has been viewed more than 42 million times on YouTube as of Friday morning.
Rober, who graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in mechanical engineering, got a master’s degree from USC and spent nine years working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, apologized profusely and said that he had been duped.
“I'm really sorry about this,” he wrote. “Ultimately, I am responsible for the content that goes on my channel and I should have done more here. I can vouch that the reactions were genuine when the package was taken from my house.”
Rober said he’s “especially gutted because so much thought, time, money and effort when into building the device and I hope this doesn’t just taint the entire effort as ‘fake.’ It genuinely works ... and we’ve made all the code and build info public.
“Again, I’m sorry for putting something up on my channel that was misleading. That is totally on me and I will take all necessary steps to make sure it won’t happen again.”
