Did you think the claims of moon landing hoaxers absurd?
Perhaps the flat earth conspiracies filled you with contempt?
Prepare yourself for the latest lunacy.
A theory claiming that Earth will lose gravity for seven seconds on August 12, 2026, has made the rounds on social media, sparking confusion and speculation. The claim originated from a so-called leaked document named Project Anchor, which began circulating online in late 2024. Posts suggested the U.S. space agency was secretly preparing for a short-lived gravitational anomaly that could lift people and objects into the air before violently bringing them back down.
You would be well-advised to nail your shoes to the floor on August 12, if you believe that nonsense.
At the center of the claim was a fabricated NASA initiative reportedly named Project Anchor, with a proposed budget of 89 billion dollars. The theory claimed the agency was preparing for a gravitational anomaly expected on August 12, 2026, at 14:33 UTC. According to content shared on now-deleted Instagram accounts, this so-called anomaly would cause anything not firmly secured to float several meters in the air before crashing back down.
The narrative was unusually detailed for a hoax. It broke down the seven seconds of supposed weightlessness step by step. In the first two seconds, people and objects would lift. By seconds three and four, they would rise up to 15 or 20 meters. By second five, panic would break out. By second seven, gravity would return, bringing a deadly descent.
How would NASA make such a specific, detailed prediction of an unprecedented event completely outside the bounds of physics?
In the absence of a credible, reputable skeptic organization, I guess we’re going to get all of our science from TikTok from now on.
Sounds like someone has been taking Calvin & Hobbes a bit too seriously.
A lot of the UFO crowd have been convinced by “whistleblowers”/influencers that Disclosure is finally going to happen either this year or next. 2026 was the date, but at least one of them decided it might be 2027. But even some people that strongly believe we are being visiting by aliens find the continual announcement of dates that come and go with no results tiring.
UFO guy Steven Greer started the Disclosure Project in 1993, before some of the current UFO fandom were even born. His disclosing hasn’t been very successful.
Don’t forget about the Tartarian Empire kooks. Tartaria makes the chemtrail conspiracy look totally believable by comparison.
A career in the medical field for me. We used to say the patient’s Primary Care Physician is Dr. Google. Yes, they owned a ton of information, no they couldn’t deploy it well. They wanted to dictate their care. Big obstacle trying to provide care to these patients. Seems like this knowledge phenomenon is spreading to other scientific domains.
There has to be a grift attached to this. Perhaps they will sell “automatic anomaly cancelling amulets” that will be guaranteed to provide substitute gravity during the test.
Fantastic! I’ll finally be able to dunk a basketball.
(Note to self; tie down basketball hoop.)
At least it’s a specific prediction…so we can all point and laugh when it doesn’t happen.
I dug a 15m hole in my yard. That way when I float up and reach ground level I can just pull myself over a couple of feet and I’ll be fine. Such a simple solution really. I offered to help my neighbors dig one too but some people don’t want to be helped I guess.
OT but related in that it is really stupid.
Trump is totally senile, very deep into dementia.
He has lost what neuroscientists call “executive functions”, the ability to plan and make good decisions.
He does whatever he wants without considering whether it is a good idea or not.
Based on past experience with exploded predictions, even after the gravitional anomaly doesn’t happen, some people will still believe. Which makes sense in a way. If you are dumb enough to believe the prediction before it has failed, you are dumb enough to still believe after.
It would make an amusing puzzle for ~high school level physics: what exactly would happen if gravity disappeared for a bit? (If I did the arithmetic right, I make centripetal acceleration at the equator to be ~3.4cm/s^2, i.e. about 3 milli-G’s. So things aren’t going take off very fast, but I can maybe imagine earthquakes caused by the change in seismic stresses? But I think the atmosphere disperses fast enough that we wouldn’t care about anything else.)
@raven: He has lost what neuroscientists call “executive functions”,
Do you have proof he had that in the first place?
@whheydt: They will simply claim that the project was cancelled after being exposed.
Isn’t this just a description of the Glorious Twelfth? Although to be fair, that used to be the sole domain of red grouse.
[note the date…]
tRUMP’s new best buddy nicki minaj (also with the intellect of a saucepan) says: NASA never put a man on the moon. WTF
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/nicki-minaj-s-latest-hot-take-nasa-never-put-humans-on-the-moon/ar-AA1VKczy
Everyone enjoying the ride down the magat Death Spiral??
I remember a silly joke from decades ago which is philosophically slightly true when it comes to what humanity has done:
‘There is no gravity, earth sucks’
Can Minaj doubting the Moon landings be a hot take when the idea was around before she was born?
NASA Project Anchor is preparing for a gravitational anomaly on August 12, 2026. You should prepare too. Your best bet is to stay indoors and hold onto a doorframe. It’s your duty to warn all your friends, too. We know this is true because NASA used metric units when providing details. Contact NASA for the exact time in your time zone. It will be Tuesday morning in California.
Perhaps this warning will vindicate NASA for attempting to mislead taxpayers by filming the moon landing with Hollywood props.
13:33 BST on ‘The Glorious Twelfth”? That’ll bugger up the grouse shoots!
Peter B@17:
How does holding onto the door frame help, when the entire house is subjected to the same fictional gravitational loss? That reminds me of a classroom exercise given many years ago, to detect if the students really understood critical reasoning. As the setup: Since there is no gravity in space [sic], how are astronauts able to walk on the moon? A student suggested: “they must be wearing very heavy boots”. False dilemma solved with an equally false solution, even assuming the dilemma was true.
0 Gravity | Solaris (1971).
.
The space station closes down gravity briefly. It is a slow, meditative scene of a slow, meditative film. The zero gravity scene reminds the audience this is about the human soul, not space.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ODDwMBCIX8I
ShermanJ@14:
Belligerently ignorant morons are always VERY eager to moron in public. Terrance Howard has “proved“ that one times one just has to be two, and he discovered the secret of the universe is the Flower of Life geometric design using “Terryology”*. And an equally idiotic Joe Rogan pronounced Howard to be a mathematical and physics “jenius”. There is no end to the list of “celebrities” endorsing astonishing levels of profound stupidity with relish. Add Kim Kardashian to the moon landing hoax list. Her only contribution to humanity appears to be confined to her butt, which is obviously where her thought processes emanate. Kyrie Irving and rapper B.o.B.have endorsed flat Earthism, Ted Nugent and the Orange Shitgibbon in the WH claim that climate change is a hoax and a scam. And the latter still claims that windmills don’t work, and they cause cancer. Kevin Sorbo insists that the Jan 6th insurrection was a false flag operation carried out by paid leftist agitators (I still peeved that I haven’t received my check from Soros). And Will Smith’s defective progeny, Jaden Smith endorses a fictional country with highly advanced technology far ahead of the rest of humanity (shades of Ancient Alien crap). Apparently, Smith’s “After Earth” garbage film to promote Jaden went entirely on his head. In that film, humanity has not been on Earth for a thousand years, so of course, the wildlife specifically evolved to attack humans on sight. And being written by Will and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, were not the great boosts that they had imagined.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/aronawriting/celebrity-conspiracy-theories-beliefs
*At least Howard has a legitimate excuse, he is seriously mentally ill. The others are merely incurably stupid and totally unable to even detect their abysmal condition. They cannot even remotely connect the dots, even if you assisted by numbered them.
CORRECTION: “I AM still peeved …” Still no posting editing capability?
zeropan@19
Most houses are attached to the ground and are therefore not going anywhere when gravity goes all wonky.
Doorframes are easy to grab.
A bunch of people will get together and pray. The event will not happen and they will be justified.
well, you can’t “lose” gravity, unless the mass of the earth and everything on it is set to zero, according to coulomb’s law.
so NASA must be testing a way to make all the mass on earth massless…
and we know what speed massless particles travel at: the speed of light.
so, no, you are not going to float up 15 meters and fall down.
the whole earth and everything around it are going to suddenly explode outwards at the speed of light.
which, i suggest, is not optimal for life on earth…
total bummer, eh?
Robbo @25: Coulomb’s law is about the electrostatic force, not gravity. And there are two ways that gravity can become zero; masses go to zero (so speed of light, etc), or the gravitational constant goes to zero.
#19- Heavy boots? I seem to recall that not as one student’s suggestion, but as a common misconception, or at least an urban legend about a class.
https://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html
I read make all the mass on earth molasses. It totally makes sense, right? Think of all the delicious oatmeal-molasses cookies. Mmmmmmm!
What’s really disgraceful is this media/information ecosystem where any dumbass, loony, con-artist or petty little troll can post any asinine story they want to, and it goes all around the world and becomes something lots of people feel (rightly or not) they have to waste time addressing. This one is relatively harmless, but medical disinformation, fraud, incitement of hate or violence, encouragement of suicide, and pandering to our worst irrational thought-processes, really needs to be aggressively reined in and discouraged. And no, most of this crap is NOT “protected speech” — it falls squarely in “clear and present danger” territory.
If we stick to the Humean account of causation, we have no valid reason to believe that the anomaly won’t take place. Roy Bhaskar’s* transcendental realism is an alternative I find plausible.
*Bhaskar went a bit loopy in a “spiritual” direction in late life.
And another problem with this “attention economy” crap is that the worst and stupidest people are allowed to pretty much control what the rest of us talk about. They make up whatever they want, and the rest of us (a considerable number of us at least) have to pause or drop what we’re doing to debunk or correct this latest brown gem, hopefully before someone gets hurt by it…and while we’re doing that, some other dimwits toss out even more possibly-harmful bullshit that we have to debunk next.
Sun Tsu wrote: “Appear where you are least expected and force your enemy to run hither and thither in response to your actions.” Social media are just one place where Republicans and the loony-right are doing this, and it’s been a very effective tactic for them.
@29 Raging Bee
You describe the state of affairs at least since the invention of writing. Crap gets spread around fast, and a diligent few clean up the mess — sometimes it takes centuries to do so.
I understand the basic authoritarian impulse of “really needs to be aggressively reined in and discouraged”. The problem, though, is that you’re handing control over to a censor authority that gets to decide what “medical disinformation”, “fraud”, “encouragement of suicide”, and “pandering to our vices” means. I’ve got news for you, especially the LGBTQ+ folk: a censor authority will disapprove of what you are and they will target you using their mandate. Florida is already doing so with gay books. A liberal society is forced underground, and самиздат such as medical disinfo (how to get an abortion, how to transition to your self-affirmed gender), fraud (abortion and trans providers), incitement of hate or violence (pride pamphlets), and pandering to our vices (if your sexual deviancy wasn’t covered anywhere else it will be in here), is all traded in secret. A liberal society may re-emerge, but that’s cold comfort to someone living through an authoritarian nightmare like the one Raging Bee wants to plunge us into.
Maybe this is a 2nd gravitation disappearance? Gravity disappears, everything rises – so all the lakes and all the oceans are above earth’s surface – and a few seconds later it all comes crashing down. This could be a naturalistic explanation of the great flood of Noah’s time!
Lordy, beholder is a veritable font of brown gems.
It isn’t as if social media is incapable of having moderated content so that their platforms don’t become toxic cesspits, but it’s more profitable to host all the fascists and the scum of the earth sexual predators.
Just ask muskrat.
The carefully-written, detailed predictive description of events reminds me of the SCP Foundation (group fiction).
Unsurprisingly, this was written several years ago:
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7426
Way to condescend and patronise them; they fucking well know, they are the ones who have hammered that point right here!
(They live it)
Rob Grigjanis @26:
“or the gravitational constant goes to zero.”
I have long forgotten their name, but decades ago someone whimsically invented a perpetual motion machine that was based on a continuously changing gravitational constant. It involved a horizontally oriented rotating shaft with an eccentric weight. If the “G” was decreasing, you merely insured that it was rotating in sync, so the fall of the weight happened before the “G” reduction, when the rise happened. And similarly if “G” was continually increasing.
zetopan, there is a shitload of historical examples about that sorta thing, and gravity is but one type.
Original type, but still.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Classification
The confusion may stem due to Coulomb’s law being mathematically analogous to Newtonian gravity due to being an inverse‑square law:
Peter B @23:
“Most houses are attached to the ground and are therefore not going anywhere when gravity goes all wonky.”
The Earth’s crust is the solid, rocky, outer shell composed of the less dense continental crust (oceanic crust is denser) resting on the top of the solid, upper mantle. The upper mantle, in turn, floats on a denser layer of lower mantle that are similar to thick molten tar. The masses of mountains and even thick ice sheets actually deforms the crust, trying to push it into the lower layers. When the continental ice melts the land masses underneath actually raise upwards due to the weight reductions. The (impossible) loss of gravity obviously removes the buoyancy since there can no longer be a change in pressure with changes of depth. But the built-in elastic deflections (vs plastic, which are permanent) are still remaining and will cause some rebound action. And the slight negative G at the equator will have an effect on the ground, since this new situation is not actually zero G, excepting at the poles, where some rebound it still possible. So, in your view, is the Earth actually glued or bolted together all the way down?
pwdm @33:
“This could be a naturalistic explanation of the great flood of Noah’s time!”
Not really, for a couple of reasons. Noah never existed and there was never a worldwide flood. The ancient Jews merely cribbed that account from earlier civilizations, who in turn had done the same stealing from even earlier civilizations, etc. The origins have been traced back some 5,000 years BP. Since the Jews were not a seafaring tribe, they describe the Ark not as a seaworthy ship, but as a big box (an Ark is a chest or box) with a single window, holding 2 of every ritually unclean kind and 14 of every other ritually clean kind. The entire fable is absurd since there have been 10’s of millions of species and their distribution is far beyond what a primitive tribe in a box could ever handle. Giant earth worms in Australia, for example, a continent that they never knew existed with their small flat earth views. And notice they did not try to save fresh or sea water species that could never tolerate a worldwide flood for a full year, in whatever type of water. Nor did they try to preserve plants including trees aboard the ark, since they thought those things just sprung from the ground.
The second reason is that with a loss of gravity, there also could be no buoyancy (a pressure change with depth).so their big box could not ever float, even if it had existed. The best it could do would have to be due to surface tension alone, in which case it could just as easily end up below the massive body of water instead of above it. Everything living thing aboard would need to hold its breath for at least a year.
https://www.wisdomai.com/insights/lex-fridman/irving-finkel-cuneiform-flood-myths-mesopotamia-84bb76ac
@ 22 zetopan
There never will be – it’s too open to abuse. Look at how the resident trolls behave now, then imagine if they could edit their comments to say something entirely different. Shits like Morales would have field day. No thanks.
@41 Silentbob
Naively implemented as a message overwrite, yes. Clearly showing that the message was edited, with timestamps, providing links to a message’s edit history, leaving the previous revisions invisible but viewable in the page source or web console, locking down comments in a necro thread, and placing reasonable limits on the amount of times a comment can be edited would go a long way towards improving the current system.
John Morales @38:
I am quite well aware of the history of perpetual motion machines, and their impossibility. Prior to retirement, I had a fairly thick stack of perpetual motion machine and other worthless patents posted outside my office. Did you know that the “combover” actually got a patent? And antigravity machines have also been very popular as well. I once met a person who had over 600 patents, and based on his age, he had to generate 3 per week continuously for a full 4 years. I’m sure he did. /S
For those interested, Ord-Hume’s book is a good starting reference: “Perpetual motion : the history of an obsession”
Although published last century, it will be missing the latest “advances” in the exciting new developments. YouTube is also a literal fountain of (obviously phony) perpetual motion machines. Some “inventors” want to sell you their books or plans, and there are idiots and/or shills praising them for solving the entire world’s energy crisis.
The president of Zimbabwe has even endorsed high-school dropout huckster Maxwell Chickumbusto’s free energy machine. He claims to have powered a TV from the RF TV channel signal it is displaying. A car, motorcycle, and even a helicopter, all powered with “microsonic free RF energy” (he does not even know what his made up name even means). His small army of defenders claims racism against blacks, if anyone disputes the absurd claims. Many of the YouTube videos have been removed (many comments were “unkind”, so wars broke out between the ultracredulous and the skeptics) but a few still remain.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1czCKASkCTI
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pVJk1ICinI4
etc.
Just search YouTube “free energy” to get inundated with over a hundred videos showing “proof” of function.
[I myself add errata as required, so I have no prob with the Omar Khayyam thingie]
re: “Did you know that the “combover” actually got a patent?”
Not specifically, but patenting does not entail verifying something works.
Like copyright, it is.
Heh. You are trying to tell your granny how to suck eggs.
(Also, Rob did make a notable point; you don’t know the difference between two inverse-square thingies)
@43: Granted patents or just applications? For a while I was following the antics of one Thane Heins, a local PMM nut/huckster (roughly equal parts of each). He had several applications, both Canadian and international, but on many he didn’t even seem to follow up the process to get them properly examined. To my knowledge one US patent got granted under a sleeper title for “increased efficiency”, which buried the loony physics under verbiage. On one of his Canadian applications he just plain made up some numbers to “demonstrate” that his invention worked, when the actual test showed that it didn’t.
Rob Grigjanis clearly addressed Robbo, not zetopan.
Zetopan’s response to Rob Grigjanis was not meant as a rebuttal; the comment referenced a physics joke (“whimsically invented”).
[Thanks, Owlmirror]
Rob Grigjanis #26…argh. I biffed Coulombs law!