The Canadian satellite that smashed a car in downtown Boston? It's art by a Hamilton sculptor

In downtown Boston, on a brick-lined street, a grey Nissan sits smashed. The car's front end is crumpled under a gleaming mass studded with antennas. 

You could hardly call the strange steel object "unidentified," though. It's prominently marked with the branding of the CSA, or the Canadian Space Agency. It seems as though a satellite, one of our own, has fallen out of orbit and crash landed on some unlucky sedan parked outside a Gap Factory store.

One passerby went to TikTok to describe the scene. "Satellite just fell out of the sky, y'all, in Boston, Downtown Crossing," user bostonbarbernick says in a video posted Friday, showing a small crowd gathered around the wreck. "We got a UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomenon] that fell out of the sky that's from Canada, y'all … This is serious shit right here," he says in another video. 

The posts blew up over the weekend, garnering more than a million views combined. They spurred reaction videos, commentary and a megaton of conjecture about the truth behind the story, which comes at the tail-end of a month-long hysteria around drones and other aerial phenomena that's swept the Northeastern United States as well as a strained moment in Canada-U.S. relations.

It turns out bostonbarbernick was right — at least partly. The object is Canadian in origin. But it didn't come from space. Rather, it came from Hamilton. 

It's an installation by Hamilton-based sculptor Brandon Vickerd. The artwork, known as Alouette, is currently on display as part of Winteractive, an outdoor art exhibit launched to enliven downtown Boston during the slower winter months. 

"When we saw it, we knew we had to have it," says Michael Nichols, president of the Boston Downtown Alliance, which runs Winteractive. "I have to tell you, after just a couple of days of [the artwork] being in downtown Boston, there are plenty of people who stop and actually wonder, 'Is this real?'"

Vickerd made Alouette in 2018. The work has been exhibited many times before, with outings in Quebec City, Ottawa and Lewiston, N.Y., to name a few. (This writer saw it at Supercrawl in Hamilton in 2022.) But something is markedly different about the reception the artwork has received this time around.

"As we are inundated with information about techno-billionaires trying to escape Earth on their private spaceships in the face of A.I. that's consuming our planet and causing massive climate change, I think we are all naturally suspicious of the ideas of space junk and technology," Vickerd says. 

"So when we're confronted with the reality of an object from beyond this world and our daily experience of a city, it creates a moment of collapse between the virtual world and these conversations we have and the physical world we inhabit. I think that's why this piece is having particular resonance at this particular moment in downtown Boston."

Alouette is a replica of the 1962 satellite Alouette I, which made Canada the third country to put a satellite in space after the Soviet Union and the U.S. The spacecraft was deactivated after a decade in service, but it's estimated it will remain in orbit for 1,000 years. 

Present-day satellites resemble "a microwave wrapped in tinfoil," Vickerd says, so he's invoked the kind of satellite a five-year-old would draw to make his artwork legible. By riffing on this icon of the Space Age, he's also referencing an "idealized period in our past when space exploration was still exciting and it held the promise of a limitless future," he says. 

It's a promise that, in some respects, has come crashing to the ground.

"That's kind of the tarnished ideal of modernism, right? Technology was supposed to solve all our problems. And 60 years on, it really hasn't. If anything, it's accelerated some of our problems."

Ultimately, he says, the artwork is about the stories we tell ourselves. "Sometimes, we see things and we know they're not true, but there's something about that narrative that is just so captivating and beautiful and believable that we suspend our disbelief."

The rational mind says that a 200-pound piece of space junk free falling from an altitude of 1,000 kilometres would either burn up or turn a Nissan Altima into a smoking crater. "But still, when we see this image of a satellite crashed into a car, we want to believe it, and everybody's first reaction is to look at the sculpture and then look up at the sky," Vickerd says. 

"There's something about that spectacle — about that story — that I think is really quite important."