The Antigravity Machine Conspiracy: What NASA Actually Researched and Why the Internet Ran With It

In 2025, a former NASA engineer named Charles Buhler announced he had built something he called a propellant-less propulsion drive, powered by what he described as a “New Force.” He claimed his device had generated enough thrust to overcome Earth‘s gravity using electrostatics alone. The claim spread fast. Headlines called it a discovery that could rewrite physics. Buhler’s own team, drawn from NASA, Blue Origin, and the Air Force, gave the story real credibility on paper. However, independent verification has not followed. This is the latest version of a story that has been repeating itself for over 30 years.

The Original Claim That Started It

In 1992, Russian physicist Evgeny Podkletnov published a peer-reviewed paper claiming a spinning superconducting disc, chilled and levitated above magnets, shielded objects above it from gravity by a couple of percent. NASA eventually took it seriously enough to fund a replication attempt. They paid an Ohio firm $650,000 to build the apparatus. The disc kept shattering during manufacturing. When engineers finally built one, they could only spin it at 30 rpm. This was far short of the 5,000 rpm Podkletnov specified. The replication never worked.

This was part of NASA’s real, publicly documented Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, active from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. NASA was also fielding roughly 100 amateur antigravity submissions a year. Eventually, they published a technical memo in 2006 explaining, patiently, why most of them didn’t work.

The Scientist Who “Disappeared”

Physicist Ning Li, working at the University of Alabama in Huntsville between 1991 and 1993, proposed that a spinning superconducting disc could generate a compounding gravitational effect. She demonstrated a 12-inch prototype to Popular Mechanics. By the late 1990s she claimed her devices were functional. However, this was never independently confirmed at scale.

Then she largely stepped out of public view, which normal researchers do. In 2008, physicist Jack Sarfatti gave an interview, since viewed millions of times, claiming Li had returned to China and that the Pentagon could no longer reach her. He framed it as a national security concern. The video ended with no resolution. That gap between “she stopped publishing” and “she disappeared” is where the conspiracy version took root.

Why the Physics Says No

Under general relativity, gravity cannot be shielded the way electromagnetism can. A 1956 paper in Science was literally titled “Nonexistence of Gravity Shields.” Antimatter, once considered a possible loophole, has been directly measured falling downward, exactly like ordinary matter.

Devices that appear to defy gravity, gyroscopes that seem to lift themselves, spinning discs, electrostatic drives, are consistently explained by conventional physics once tested rigorously. The explanations include conservation of angular momentum, electrostatic pressure differentials, and measurement error. NASA’s own 2006 report on the subject exists specifically because so many of these claims turn out to rely on the same well-understood tricks.

What Is Actually True Right Now

As of the most recent government assessments, including NASA’s 2023 study and the Pentagon’s 2024 report on unexplained aerial phenomena, there is no public, verifiable evidence that any government or private entity has demonstrated working antigravity propulsion. Buhler’s 2025 claims remain unverified by independent labs. Meanwhile, dark energy, the genuine cosmological mystery that behaves like a repulsive force at galactic scale, remains completely different from anything you could build in a lab.

Gravity is still exactly as strong as it has always been. Nobody has found the switch. However, several credentialed engineers keep looking for one, and the internet keeps finding a story in the gap between the search and the result.