Project Anchor: Anatomy of a Hoax

by Brian Dunning
April 28, 2026

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At the end of 2024, social media users announced the discovery of a secret NASA program called Project Anchor, pertaining to a seven-second loss of gravity on the Earth to occur in August 2026. Some 40 to 60 million were said to be expected to die in the event. The cause was given as “the intersection of two gravitational waves from black holes.” This claim was shared widely for some weeks. Likely most of the shares were intended with tongue in cheek, but there are always people who believe any such thing, especially anything that casts NASA as some shadowy, evil entity. Today we’re going to talk about just how we can tell, quite easily in fact, that it is a hoax.

Origin of the hoax

Project Anchor was initially posted on December 31, 2025 by an Instagram user called @mr_danya_of. Overlaid on a video background was a roll of text that said:

On August 12, 2026, the world will lose gravity for 7 seconds. NASA knows. They're preparing but won't tell us why.

In November 2024, a secret NASA document titled "Project Anchor" leaked online. The project's budget is $89 billion, and its goal is to survive a 7-second gravitational anomaly expected on August 12, 2026, at 14:33 UTC.

Key facts:

• Duration: 7.3 seconds.
• Expected casualties: 40-60 million.

What will happen:
1-2 seconds: Everything not secured will rise (people, vehicles, animals).
3-4 seconds: Objects will continue to rise to 15-20 meters.
5-6 seconds: Panic and chaos will ensue as people hit ceilings.
7 seconds: Gravity returns, and everything falls from height.

Expected consequences:

• 40 million deaths from falls.
• Infrastructure destruction.
• Economic collapse lasting over 10 years.
• Mass panic.

Reason for the anomaly: The intersection of two gravitational waves from black holes, predicted in 2019 with a probability of 94.7%. NASA has known about this for five years.

What NASA is doing:

• Building underground bunkers for "essential personnel."
• Developing securing systems for buildings.

Who will get spots in the bunkers: Government leaders, scientists, military personnel, and "selected citizens with genetic diversity."

Why they're silent: An announcement would trigger mass panic and chaos. Better to have 40 million unprepared victims than 8 billion in a state of panic.

The leak has been ignored by the media as "conspiracy theory," but an independent physicist confirmed the intersection of gravitational waves. His paper was retracted, and he has since disappeared.

What you can do: Follow the "civilian survival protocol":

• Stay indoors with a low ceiling.
• Lie on the floor face down.
• Hold onto something secured.

20 months until the event. NASA knows. Governments are preparing. They won't tell you.

It seems like a lot of trouble. If I wanted to survive seven seconds of zero gravity, I wouldn’t need a $90 billion underground bunker; I’d hold onto a tree for seven seconds, then go about my business.

Now depending on when you’re listening to this, August 12, 2026 might have already come and gone. Doesn’t matter. After that date, we’ll know it didn’t happen; before that date, we know it won’t. How do we know that? Well, let’s talk about that.

First of all, many of us here now — people who listen to Skeptoid and to similar shows — can probably easily tell that nothing in this makes any sense; but the vast majority of people don’t know that at all. You could stop 100 people on the street and ask them to explain why this event is impossible. How many could do so correctly? I don’t know, but I bet it’s fewer than five. So let’s lend a hand.

Gravitational waves

The important thing to understand is what a gravitational wave is. First of all, it would probably have the simpler name of gravity wave, and the only reason it doesn’t is that the name was already taken. Gravity waves are not very intuitively named. When you throw a rock into a lake and it makes expanding concentric waves in the water, those are gravity waves. They’re called that because gravity is what’s trying to pull the water back down after the rock splashed it up. Any wave in a fluid in which gravity is the force trying to restore equilibrium is called a gravity wave.

It wasn’t until much more recently that physicists began looking for waves in gravity itself — and the name that was available for these is the mouthier and more awkward gravitational waves.

Intuitively, we might assume that if gravitational waves went by, we might get heavier and lighter and heavier and lighter, as if the waves are changes in the strength of gravity. But that’s not what they are at all. The waves describe changes in the shape of spacetime itself; it’s really hard to understand this intuitively, but spacetime compresses and expands with the passing of each wave. The room you’re in stretches and compresses a tiny amount; but you also stretch and compress with it, so you can’t notice it. How much you weigh — the strength of gravity — is determined by your mass and that of the Earth, and that’s not affected by these waves.

It takes a very powerful event in space to make waves in the gravitational field. The details are beyond the scope of this show, but it takes a huge amount of mass spinning asymmetrically, like a car tire that’s out of balance, and technically described as having a changing quadrupole moment. The only thing powerful enough to create gravitational waves strong enough to be detectable is the collision or merger of two supermassive, spinning objects like neutron stars or black holes.

LIGO

The waves from such events are what instruments like LIGO were built to detect. LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — is one of several such detectors around the world. I’ve visited the one in Hanford, Washington, and you can go see it too. It has two perpendicular tunnels, each 4 km long. Lasers travel the distance of both arms, and since both are the same length, the beams arrive at the same time. Interferometry is used to detect any change in the times of their arrivals. If the times do ever change, it means one or both of the perpendicularly-placed tunnels expanded or contracted, which means a gravitational wave went by. LIGO first detected such an event in 2015, the same year in which it was completed and first came online.

To give some idea of the measurements involved in that initial detection: that 4 km tunnel expanded and contracted by approximately 84 zeptometers. That’s about one ten thousandth the diameter of a proton — over 4 km. The frequency swept from around 35 to 150 Hz, meaning the tunnel’s length oscillated that many times each second. The entire duration of the detectable signal was about one fifth of a second. So these are very, very, very small events, which is why it takes such a staggeringly sensitive instrument to detect them.

The arrival of gravitational waves is also something that cannot be predicted, which is yet one more way in which this hoax self-identifies as a hoax. The reason they’re not predictable is that the waves move at the speed of light, so it’s impossible to know about them before they get here. We look out into space and see that there are some systems that will probably collide in the future, but we’re usually talking millions of years. We know of no such systems where black holes have a collision so imminent that we could give an exact date.

So that’s the basic science behind how we know Project Anchor is a hoax. Gravitational waves have nothing to do with Earth’s gravity changing or turning off, or with things floating up into the air; and their arrival cannot be known in advance.

But the flagrant pseudoscience was not the only giveaway that this story is a hoax. Here are a few more:

NASA construction?

The story claims NASA is spending $89 billion dollars on constructing underground bunkers and developing systems for securing buildings (presumably to the ground). Well, if I needed some construction done and some sort of building anchors designed, NASA is probably not who I’d call; they contract out all of their own construction. And since their budget for 2026 is only $24 billion, they’re going to find themselves $65 billion short.

Centripetal acceleration?

I did see one thread where this conspiracy theory was being discussed in a decidedly non-expert kind of way, and someone made a point that others found compelling. If gravity stopped, “centrifugal force” would fling everyone and everything off into space; so all people and things would indeed get dangerously high very quickly, just as the hoax claims.

Conceptually, this is correct. But first of all, what we’re talking about is more accurately called the centrifugal effect, which would give everything on the surface centripetal acceleration away from the Earth’s rotational axis. This effect is zero at the poles, and greatest at the equator. But the acceleration is not that much; only 1/290th that of gravity. An unsecured object at the equator, in seven seconds, would rise 83 cm (about two and a half feet). By the time you get as far north as St. Petersburg, Russia at 60ºN, it would be half as much.

This would still do an enormous amount of damage. Most cars would probably be totaled. All items of personal property would get broken. Countless people and animals would be injured. Plants and trees would all be fine, as their roots generally provide more than enough strength against high winds to withstand an upward force as low as 1/290th g.

Likewise, all buildings would suddenly find themselves in a war of their attachments to the ground vs. their new upward acceleration. Small structures like houses, whose foundations rely mainly upon gravity, would likely all take flight, fall 83 cm, and become rubble. The foundations of the heaviest buildings with piles driven into bedrock would be more than strong enough, but what about the rest of the building above the foundation? Buildings’ internal structures are engineered to resist compressive loads; suddenly replace all of that with tension and upward acceleration? Few were designed with such an eventuality in mind — probably cities in Tornado Alley would turn out to be the ones that survive best!

Luckily, it’s merely a fun thought experiment. Gravity is a fundamental property of spacetime, and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Project Anchor — well named, considering the issues with buildings — is just an Internet fantasy, a fun prank written up by a jokester who’s probably still laughing at us for even talking about it. So, from that angle, enjoy it for what it’s worth.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning