On August 12th, a good chunk of the internet got convinced Earth’s gravity was going to switch off for exactly seven seconds, like someone was about to unplug the planet and plug it back in. The theory even had a name, “Project Anchor,” and a suspiciously specific budget line of $89 billion, sourced from a NASA document that nobody could ever actually produce. Nobody produced it because it doesn’t exist.
NASA eventually had to go on the record about this, which is a sentence I did not expect to type this year. A federal space agency issued a public statement defending the continued existence of gravity, because enough people online believed a fake two-year-old memo over the entire field of physics.
The theory claimed the planet would lose gravity long enough to kill tens of millions of people, and that government officials had already been moved into bunkers ahead of time to ride it out safely. The “leaked” document was supposedly dated back to November 2024. Nobody has explained why it sat around unused for two years before anyone acted on it.
Fact-checkers at Snopes found nothing. NASA found nothing. The theory kept spreading anyway, gaining followers right up until the date itself instead of losing them, which is usually a sign a claim is doing something other than being true.
Context helps explain why it caught fire when it did. August 12th also happened to feature a total solar eclipse and the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, two real astronomical events that had nothing to do with gravity but gave the whole thing a coat of plausible-sounding paint. NASA senior science communicator Karen Fox said this exact flavor of doomsday “comes around every year.” Different date, same panic, and gravity never once needed defending until a screenshot said otherwise.
Here’s the part that actually bugs me. It’s not that a doomsday theory existed, because every year produces one. It’s how little the internet required to make this one travel: no scientist backing it up, nothing beyond a screenshot passed around until it started looking official. That was enough to force a real government agency into issuing a real correction about a fake budget for a project that would violate actual physics if it existed. It doesn’t.
Nobody floated away on August 12th. You’re reading this with your feet on the ground, most likely still holding the exact phone that told you they might not be.
My two cents: gravity’s fine. Your feed’s the problem.