CHILDREN OF THE SUN: WHEN THE ALIENS CAME TO SAVE US FROM OURSELVES

In 1977, Billy Thorpe and producer Spencer Proffer went to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind and walked out with a perfectly reasonable question:

What happens next?

Spielberg's aliens had arrived. Contact had been made. Roll credits.

Thorpe and Proffer went back to Proffer's house, picked up guitars, enjoyed what Proffer later described as some cognac and "pretty good smoke," and constructed their own sequel—not to the movie exactly, but to the idea.

The result became “Children of the Sun,” a nearly seven-minute slab of cosmic FM rock eventually released in 1979.

And these weren't the usual aliens coming to probe the livestock.

Thorpe's extraterrestrials had been watching humanity self-destruct.

Their proposition was essentially:

People of Earth, we've reviewed your performance.

Would anybody like a ride?

The survivors leave a ruined Earth with a benevolent extraterrestrial civilization and get another shot somewhere else. Proffer has specifically described the story as a friendly alien race observing humanity's destruction and offering an escape.

There is something wonderfully late-'70s about this.

Nuclear anxiety. Ecological dread. Carl Sagan. Close Encounters. Planetarium laser shows. Gigantic synthesizers.

The UFO wasn't necessarily the monster anymore.

We were.

The recording itself was appropriately excessive. Thorpe and Proffer spent close to a year developing the album, backed by heavyweight players including bassist Leland Sklar and drummer Alvin Taylor. Proffer even put his own money into the project. Then, just as the title track was succeeding on rock radio, Capricorn Records collapsed into bankruptcy.

Cosmic salvation had encountered accounting.

Now comes the stranger resurrection.

The original 1979 Children of the Sun became difficult to obtain for decades. A 1987 Revisited edition altered the project, while the original album received only a scarce Australian CD pressing in 1993. In 2026, Iconoclassic Records finally returned to production masters located with help from Universal's archives and issued a newly remastered version of the original album.

And suddenly this magnificent UFO artifact is transmitting again.

Not evidence.

Not disclosure.

Not prophecy.

Something perhaps more revealing:

a cultural X-ray of the moment when humanity looked toward the stars and wondered whether the aliens might be less dangerous than the people waiting for them down here.

That's Magic Pop.