Calling Occupants
My favourite line from the old Klaatu song Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft arrives about a minute in when, after a second or two of no voice, the singer, presumably making the case to aliens who might be tuned in, sings: We are your friends The song came out in 1976. Four years later, Carl Sagan delivered Cosmos, his popular apology for the search for extraterrestrial life. I loved the song, read and copied quotes from the book and actually spent many hours on my back in the yard looking up at the stars, trying to connect the dots. Looking back, it's little wonder that there was an audience for the song, the book. Those were Cold War days, and the chill fingered its way even into northeast Edmonton where I grew up. Mutual Assured Destruction, SALT, ICBMs, nuclear winter, armageddon, apocalypse—all these terms glimpsed on the pages of The Edmonton Journal. We are your friends Out of nowhere yesterday, the song was on the radio. Actually, not out of nowhere, but ...