Fact Check: Claim That Earth's Gravity Will Disappear for 7 Seconds on 12 August 2026

A narrative claiming that Earth’s gravity will disappear for seven seconds on Wednesday, 12 August 2026, has gone viral on social media. The chain message warns that humans, animals, and vehicles will float into the air before falling back when gravity returns. However, fact-checking confirms this claim is false.

The United States space agency NASA has officially refuted the theory. In a statement cited by the New York Post, NASA confirmed that the Earth will not lose its gravitational force on that date. Scientifically, Earth’s gravity is intrinsically linked to the planet’s mass, and this force cannot simply vanish without a fundamental change to the mass itself.

The unsettling theory reportedly originates from a conspiracy narrative about a secret initiative called Project Anchor, which is claimed to be a multibillion-dollar project designed to address a space anomaly. To date, there is no scientific evidence or official documentation supporting the existence of Project Anchor or a scenario in which a gravitational wave could negate Earth’s gravity. Science publication IFL Science also stressed that gravity is not a mechanism with an ‘on/off’ switch; it is a fundamental interaction between a planet’s mass and surrounding objects, and no mechanism in physics allows gravity to pause momentarily and then suddenly return to normal. While gravitational waves are a real phenomenon produced by extreme cosmic events, they do not possess the power to nullify a planet’s gravity.

The emergence of this theory is suspected to be capitalising on several real astronomical phenomena predicted to occur on 12 August 2026. This rare combination of celestial events is often misinterpreted or twisted by hoax creators to generate panic. The actual astronomical phenomena occurring on that date include a Total Solar Eclipse, which will cross from Spain to Iceland but will not be observable from Indonesia as the path of totality does not pass over the country. It is important to note that neither a solar eclipse nor a meteor shower affects the Earth’s mass, and therefore these phenomena will not alter or eliminate the force of gravity.