JOHN HEARTFIELD-UFO CONNECTION?

For their 1979 single 'Mittageissen,' Siouxsie and the Banshees used a John Heartfield photomontage on the picture sleeve.

Reproduced below is another photomontage by the same artist.

Although this work dates from more than a decade before the terms 'flying saucer' and 'ufo' came into common vocabulary, it is obvious that most people looking at it now, would view it as a depiction of a UFO. In fact, there is a strong resemblance to one of the two photographs taken by Ralph Ditter in Zanesville, Ohio on November 13th 1966.

Ralph Ditter

Mr.Ditter was walking away from his house, carrying a camera, when he looked back to see an unidentified aircraft in the sky close to his home.

It is evident that after taking the first photo (above), he moved back closer to the craft, heading along a course between the car on the right and the tree in the above photograph. From this excellent viewing position, Ralph Ditter took this second photo................................

...which bears comparison with John Heartfield's photomontage featuring the airborne German helmet dating from about 30 years earlier...

 

---------------------------------------------------

HONOLULU ADVERTISER Tuesday February 7, 1967

What's That Thing?... Ohio Barber Says It's A Flying Saucer

ZANESVILLE, Ohio (UPI) - A Zanesville barber made available yesterday photographs of what he said was a flying saucer hovering about 47 feet above the ground last November.

Ralph Ditter, 40, an amateur astronomer, said he took polaroid pictures of the object Nov.13 at a speed of 125/16. Two of the three pictures he says he took that afternoon are sharp and show a disc-like object hovering above a one-story frame house.

Ditter had been displaying the pictures in the shop here where he works. The two small prints show an object that looks like a covered plate. In one picture it is just above the house, in the other it is farther away.

"It was a nice Sunday afternoon so I decided to go and take pictures of some furniture my brother-in-law built in his house about three blocks away," said Ditter. "I was carrying my polaroid camera. At the end of the driveway I stopped and turned around and saw it. It was directly over my house, about 47 feet in the air, moving about 10 or 15 miles per hour and rotating counter-clockwise. I took three pictures of it (one of them, taken with a filter, was underexposed) and as I watched it drifted off a little bit southwest and disappeared over a hill, " he said.

Ditter said he ran inside the house to take out the developed pictures and then grabbed motion picture equipment and went back outside. He said he waited for about two hours but the object did not reappear. He described it as about 20 feet in diameter, silent and said it had no apparent effect on anything on the ground.

"My wife and two of my children saw the pictures, but other than that at first I wasn't going to tell anybody at all," Ditter said. The pictures he displays in the barbershop, along with photos of the Moon he took through a telescope and a chart of the solar system, brought varied reactions, opinions and explanations.

Ditter has no doubt about what he saw.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Links:
John Heartfield / John Heartfield+6 images / Zygosis documentary /
Siouxsie&The Banshees-John Heartfield

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back To CHOSEN TO SHOW THE WORLD PART 1