Will Earth lose gravity for seven seconds on August 12, 2026?

What the claim says

The version that spreads most widely is specific: on 12 August 2026, at 14:33 UTC, two gravitational waves from colliding black holes will intersect and switch off Earth's gravity for seven seconds. A leaked NASA document allegedly puts the probability at 94.7 percent. A secret program called 'Project Anchor', budgeted at $89 billion, is said to be quietly building shelters while official denials continue.

Fact-checkers have traced the narrative to an Instagram video posted on 31 December 2025, which presented the supposed Project Anchor document. Nobody has produced the document. That is not an oversight in the story; it is the story.

Why the physics doesn't work

Gravity is not a system with a switch. It is the effect of mass: Earth pulls on you because Earth is a very large amount of rock, metal, water, and air, all of it staying exactly where it is on 12 August. A NASA spokesperson put it plainly — the only way for Earth to lose gravity would be for Earth to lose the mass that produces it.

Gravitational waves are real and are routinely detected, but they are ripples in spacetime measured at scales far smaller than a proton's width by the time they reach us. Two of them meeting does not cancel a planet. Physicists asked about the scenario have described it as far outside the realm of possibility, which is a polite way of saying it is not a scenario.

It is also worth noticing what the claim quietly borrows: a real, published prediction of a black-hole-related observation gives the story a scientific-sounding anchor point, and the rumor attaches an unrelated catastrophe to it. That move — real event, invented consequence — is the most common structure in this entire genre.

What NASA and news organisations actually said

NASA denied the claim directly in January 2026: "The Earth will not lose gravity on August 12, 2026." The agency also explained the reasoning rather than simply issuing a denial, which is the more useful part.

Independent outlets and fact-checking desks reached the same conclusion, including BBC Bitesize, IFLScience, Popular Mechanics, and Tempo's fact-check unit, which traced the claim to its originating video. No space agency, observatory, or physics institution anywhere has supported it.

• No document: 'Project Anchor' has no published record, budget line, or personnel.
• No mechanism: gravitational waves do not cancel a planet's mass.
• No agency backing: NASA denies it explicitly and by name.
• No countdown: the 14:33 UTC precision was added for effect, not derived from anything.

What to do on 12 August 2026

Your errands. Nothing about the day requires bolting the furniture down, cancelling a flight, or stockpiling anything. If you want a genuinely useful use of the mild anxiety, aim it at something that does occasionally happen where you live — a power cut, a storm, a phone that dies at the wrong moment.

And if someone sends you the screenshot on the day, the method is the same as it always is: find the original, then find the agency that would know first. It takes about ten minutes and it works on almost every version of this.

How we've classified it

Unconfirmed Claim: circulating widely, denied by the institution it names, with no supporting evidence produced by anyone. We will not be updating this file on 12 August unless something genuinely unexpected happens, in which case gravity will be the least of the day's editorial problems.