Two counter-rotating metal discs. A whisper of ultrasound. A crackling Tesla coil. In homebuilt garage labs around the country, a small builder community has spent years trying to replicate Alexey Chekurkov’s Graviflyer—a tabletop device that seems to rise into the air and dares investigators to say how or why.

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Graviflyer: A Claim in Search of a Verdict

When Russian YouTuber Alexey Chekurkov began posting videos around 2017 of a dinner-plate-sized “Graviflyer” rising off a workbench, most viewers filed it alongside perpetual-motion curiosities and viral hoaxes. The footage seemed almost designed to invite debunking—Chekurkov waved hoops around the machine, swept hands above and below it, and filmed from multiple angles as the saucer-like rig hovered and drifted.

That changed when researcher Charles Crawford III obtained one of Chekurkov’s original units, painstakingly documented its internals, and released a build recipe. The kit, he says, combines four subsystems: a high-voltage flyback circuit that biases the spinning discs; a hand-wound Tesla coil; a top-mounted ultrasonic piezo element; and a lightweight frame holding two counter-rotating discs separated by a central plate.

Armed with those details, Portland engineer Jarod Yates did what the skeptics had long demanded: he started building. “I was fifty-fifty at the start,” he says. “The only way to prove it either way was to try.”

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Who Is Alexey Chekurkov?

Alexey Chekurkov is a Russian garage-inventor and video creator who has posted Graviflyer levitation clips for years under a “garage technologies” banner. His on-camera demonstrations feature a compact stack of metal plates spinning in opposite directions, energized by high voltage and radio-frequency resonance, with a momentary tap on an ultrasonic “catch” button that he treats like a tuning fork for the effect.

The persona is part hands-on hacker, part showman, part elusive inventor. In long technical calls with followers he speaks in metaphors—torsion vortices, “safe-cracking” combinations of duty cycle and frequency—while remaining tight-lipped about the deeper theory. He has claimed thefts and break-ins, alternates between open sharing and long silences, and seems to accept the role of folk figure at the edges of mainstream physics.

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What’s Actually Being Claimed About the Graviflyer

• Propulsion without reaction mass. The device is presented as a new form of thrust that does not expel propellant, distinct from ion wind or concealed fans. Replicators echo the claim while acknowledging that a mechanism is unknown.

• Architecture. Descriptions converge on two counter-rotating conductive discs, a stationary center plate, a flyback high-voltage bias on the order of tens of kilovolts, a roughly megahertz-class Tesla coil, and a top-mounted ultrasonic transducer used briefly during “tuning.”

• Lift with a tethered feed. Demonstrations show ascents while the craft remains on a cord; it has not been shown lifting its full power supply.

• Operational ritual. Builders bring subsystems online in sequence—motors to speed, high voltage to bias, RF to resonance—then momentarily trigger ultrasound. Reported successes are intermittent and timing-sensitive.

• Collateral interference. Attempted lift events are frequently accompanied by bursts of radio-frequency interference that glitch cameras, routers, and nearby test equipment.

• Ongoing controversy. Critics point to the need for vacuum tests, Faraday shielding, and preregistered measurement protocols to rule out electrostatic artifacts and hidden supports.

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Is the Graviflyer Legit?

The Graviflyer is a long bet—one that stretches the limits of imagination and asks “what if,” while demanding a measure of suspension of disbelief. Many experimenters, and nearly all reputable scientists, think it’s a hoax; yet with hundreds of builders scrutinizing dozens of videos on Alexey Chekurkov’s channel, nobody has quite nailed down how the trick would be done.

In construction terms, the Graviflyer is a collection of second-hand electronics that Chekurkov salvages from local scrap and cobbles into a Frankenstein’s monster of disks, magnets, motors, and high-voltage supplies—an apparatus that appears to produce several pounds of lift with comparatively modest input power.

The inventor is as enigmatic as the device. Alexey Chekurkov has no formal training or degree and says the Graviflyer emerged from more than a decade of piecing together parts and concepts. His inspirations range across fringe and emerging physics—from torsion theories to electrogravitics—yet he offers no fully integrated model to explain why or how the machine would produce lift.

Behaviorally, Chekurkov seems to avoid the spotlight. He has spent time helping innovators such as Charles Crawford with replication attempts, but beyond posting videos to his YouTube channel, he largely sidesteps publicity. He also takes long breaks from the internet, sometimes disappearing for months and leaving emails unanswered.

Crawford is among several innovators who have purchased Graviflyer units directly from Chekurkov. According to buyers, Chekurkov claims to test these devices but then completely disassembles them before shipment—raising the possibility that reassembly errors could doom replications, especially if precise tolerances are critical to operation.

Perhaps the biggest question about legitimacy comes from the lack of successful replications. Chekurkov has provided detailed schematics and advice for building and tuning the Graviflyer, but despite dozens of careful attempts, independent teams have yet to see a clean lift-off. Early failures were often attributed to the complexity of his tuning ritual; over time, however, replicators have noted that Chekurkov himself changes tuning parameters and substitutes major components—even ones he previously insisted should never be altered.

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Inside the Graviflyer: Anatomy of an Outlier

The public teardown reads like a lab manual for a machine that straddles electronics and folklore. The high-voltage stage drives a flyback transformer through a transistor and power resistors; an oscilloscope trace shows a fast rise and slower fall—exactly the sawtooth favored by old “lifter” experiments, though the Graviflyer’s reported thrust-to-weight would have to exceed such corona effects by orders of magnitude. The Tesla coil resonates near a megahertz, inductively coupling into the central plate via a wire that deliberately doesn’t make hard contact. Motors spin the upper and lower discs around a few thousand RPM. The top disc is plain metal; the lower disc is studded with magnets near its rim. And perched above it all, a piezo buzzer emits ultrasound that the inventor “catches” by stabbing a momentary button at just the right instant.

The build notes are detailed enough to reproduce, right down to coil diameters, aluminum thicknesses, and the surprising fragility of components that overheat or arc if driven too hard. They even document a homemade meter—a three-antenna probe with colored LEDs that, according to the inventor’s instructions, lights differently when “vortices” are forming around the machine. The language is speculative; the procedure is not.

Yates, meanwhile, treats the device as both puzzle and physics problem. He built multiple variants with different disc diameters and spacings and compiled a spreadsheet mapping mechanical dimensions to acoustic and electromagnetic wavelengths in air and aluminum. The goal is pragmatic: isolate a set of frequencies and geometries that produce any repeatable nudge—“a wiggle,” as he puts it—and iterate from there.

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The Graviflyer Tuning Ritual

If there’s a leitmotif to every Graviflyer session, it’s patience. Chekurkov’s own routine, reconstructed in long group calls with a translator, involves sequentially bringing subsystems online—motors to speed, high voltage to bias, Tesla coil to resonance—then jabbing the ultrasonic trigger in a series of “tuning sessions” that can each take nearly an hour. If the timing is wrong, he powers everything down and lets the apparatus discharge for ten to fifteen minutes before trying again.

In one call, after two fruitless sessions, he tried a third time. The machine didn’t rise cleanly—it tipped and slammed back down—but what followed shocked everyone watching: a burst of interference that knocked out the webcam and Wi-Fi router and even tripped nearby appliances. Weeks later, they saw a clean ascent during another call. The device rose for a few seconds—until, again, local electronics failed in a cascade of radio-frequency mayhem.

Those violent RF episodes have become a repeating character note. Even careful instrument users warn that the Graviflyer’s electromagnetic tantrums can desensitize scopes and glitch nearby gear. Shielding and Faraday caging, they add, will come later—first they want to observe the phenomenon at all.

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Graviflyer: Not Strings, Not Ions—So What?

Any extraordinary claim earns an extraordinary gauntlet of mundane explanations. The first accusation—a hidden suspension—was the easiest to anticipate: clips include arm sweeps, hula hoops, ceiling pans, and floor reveals; some are filmed outdoors; and critics’ “fishing line” scenarios founder on multiple angles and hand-in-frame control sequences. While showmanship is no substitute for measurement, frame-by-frame inspection of original footage hasn’t revealed a mechanical cheat.

The second accusation—that it’s just ion wind—fares worse against the numbers. To loft a kilogram-class rig with corona thrust would require currents and erosion that the hardware simply doesn’t show; the discs would grind themselves down as sacrificial propellant in hours, and the reported voltages aren’t high enough to hurl enough mass to generate kilograms of lift.

More intriguing are behaviors that don’t fit any familiar propulsive mechanism. In one field video, after the system is switched off, the device remains aloft for around twenty seconds before descending—a “persistence” that scales with altitude in other clips. If genuine, that lag implies stored energy in fields or materials—not a steady push from a fan or ion stream.

None of this proves new physics. But it sets a more interesting table: either there’s an artful deception that survives unusually close scrutiny—or there’s an outlier coupling among high voltage, high-Q resonance, rotating conductors, and ultrasound that mainstream labs haven’t mapped yet.

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The Graviflyer Replication Community: Classical, Jazz, and Metrologist

The effort now has three archetypes. One plays the “classical” score—building to spec and documenting parts so others can follow the same sheet music. Another improvises, swapping variables to find a general mechanism. And a veteran metrologist instruments an original unit to get clean data. In practice, that looks like Charles Crawford III (meticulous kit documentation), Jarod Yates (iterative experiment design), and retired Boeing engineer Mike Gamble, who has taken custody of an original unit to instrument it surgically.

Crawford and Yates anchor a small but passionate builder community online working toward replications. Other members include Nathan Bunten of the Old Man Builds YouTube channel, the late experimenter Chris Hardeman, electrogravitics researcher Russell Anderson, and many more.

Together, the members of this community have been working to capture data from Alexey Chekurkov’s statements; create construction blueprints, parts lists, and circuit diagrams; and share results from ongoing replication attempts. These experimenters come from different walks of life, with varied educational backgrounds, technical training, and even competing theories for how the Graviflyer might work—but their shared interest and steady collaboration have forged a strong, supportive online network committed to testing the claim with open methods and transparent results.

The practical takeaways so far are prosaic but essential: brushless controllers can misbehave in noisy RF fields; thin aluminum discs outperform 3D-printed surrogates; and digital scales can saturate near high voltage, masking force with faux readings. Replication is long stretches of engineering common sense punctuated by rare, consequential surprises.

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What Would It Take to Validate Alexey Chekurkov’s Graviflyer?

If you’ve read this far waiting for a verdict, here’s the honest one: the Graviflyer is still on trial. Claims of lift have impressed a circle of careful, technically literate builders. But a claim that nudges at the edges of known physics must be brought into the bright center of method. The roadmap is straightforward:

• Independent, registered tests. Pre-registered measurement plans, third-party labs, and clear pass/fail criteria reduce bias and cherry-picking.

• Controls and nulls. Identical mass dummies, sham ultrasonics, and “dark” runs under Faraday shielding separate signal from RF interference.

• Vacuum trials. Even partial vacuum will sharply suppress ionic and thermal plumes and expose any residual thrust.

• Force metrology. Torsion balances with optical readout and mechanical damping—well away from high-voltage electronics—beat load cells in noisy fields.

• EM hygiene. Cages, line filters, and spectrum analyzers will tell us whether the “EMP bursts” are a symptom of lift or just collateral chaos.

That list is less glamorous than a hovering plate—but it’s how anomalies become knowledge.

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What the Graviflyer Quest Is Teaching Its Builders

There’s another layer to this story that matters even if the Graviflyer never clears the bar: what it does to the people who try. Builders admit the project has been a crucible in measurement technique and lab craft, a master class in how rotating machinery, high voltage, and radio-frequency fields conspire against naïve setups. The open sharing of schematics has already upped the level of discourse by replacing rumor with parts lists. And the group’s hardest-won lesson—document mercilessly, share openly—has made the effort less about a single inventor and more about a community standard.

Chekurkov himself, wary after reported thefts, remains elusive, drifting between bursts of candor and months-long silences. He talks in the language of torsion fields and “picking a safe’s combination” by duty cycle, voltage, and frequency—a metaphor that might be more accurate than he knows. In complex, cross-coupled systems, small changes really can unlock qualitatively different behaviors. But metaphors won’t carry the day. Only disciplined replication will.

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The Ending We Can Write

If the Graviflyer is real, it will survive the bright lights of controlled tests. If it isn’t, the very process of testing will leave something valuable behind: better instrumentation practices, a richer public record, and a sharper cultural instinct for how to treat fringe claims neither with reflexive dismissal nor credulous awe, but with the messy, hopeful seriousness that science at its best affords.

For now, in a lab humming with flyback whine and radio hiss, the tuning ritual continues. Motors spin up. A Tesla coil sings into resonance. A hand hovers over a small off-key button—the ultrasonic “catch.” Somewhere between myth and measurement, a plate hesitates.

This article draws on conference presentations by Charles Crawford III, (“Alexey Chekurkov’s Graviflyer Kit”) and interviews with Jarod Yates, (“Replicating Alexey Chekurkov’s Graviflyer”) and (“Graviflyer Replication Experiments”).