Ionel Talpazan, an outsider artist from Romania who sold his visionary works of U.F.O.s and life in outer space on the sidewalks of Manhattan before being discovered in the late 1980s, died on Sept. 21 in Manhattan. He was 60.

The cause was complications of a stroke and advanced diabetes, Aarne Anton, his dealer at the American Primitive Gallery in SoHo, said.

Mr. Talpazan claimed that one night in the Romanian countryside, when he was 8, a strange, hovering shape slowly descended from the sky, enveloping him in a celestial blue light, and then disappeared. The experience haunted him and became the source of his art.

His paintings, drawings and sculptures dealt, obsessively, with U.F.O.s and their inner workings, often shown in cross section and heavily annotated in Romanian.