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. Pro...