First UFO multimedia festival in N.Y.

NEW YORK, June 22 (UPI) -- New York's East Village will be the site of one man's attempt to bring UFO culture back into the American spotlight.

The three-day UFOs: The Culture of Contact Multi-Media Festival kicks of Friday night and is scheduled to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Roswell, N.M. incident, in which some believe that the U.S. government recovered a crashed unidentified flying object and its occupants.

The festival, which was launched by Jeremy Vaeni, will feature music, theater and alleged abductees' art and hopes to reconnect the topic of extraterrestrials with mainstream audiences, The New York Sun said Friday.

"We need to make the whole subject hip again," explained Vaeni, who said he's been abducted by a UFO. "Not that long ago, it had seeped in to the pop culture; you even had aliens in Kodak commercials. It made it so people just sort of took it for granted that these things exist. I think the whole movement lost its edge and now it's harder to get new people into it."

Vaeni also told the Sun that through his encounters with the unexplained he has come to possess a unique energy that offers him a "psychic awakening" to other dimensions and states of consciousness.