Happy Friday! Editor Ira is here to talk about the intersection of space and pop music:

We recently ran a question involving "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft," a psychedelic sci-fi song that was a minor chart hit twice in the 1970s and whose history is one of the densest of its era. It's a tale that begins with Canadian music nerds, detours through The Beatles and UFO cults, and ends up with a pop icon ushering in stimulated galactic peace. Let's begin.

Klaatu was formed in 1973 by Toronto musicians John Woloschuk, Dee Long, and Terry Draper. The trio took its name from the semi-benevolent space invader played by Michael Rennie in the sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." ("Star Wars" sidebar: Rennie's alien phrase "Klaatu barada nikto" also inspired the names of three tertiary characters from "Return of the Jedi.") Their musical style is hard to pin down, especially on their first record, 1976's "3:47 EST." They're often classed as prog rock, but their early stuff is more buoyant and accessible than, say, their countrymates in Rush. I'd call them psychedelic prog-pop, but that would make me sound like an insufferable tool, so I won't.

That hard-to-pin-down eclecticism was responsible for arguably their biggest and most dubious claim to fame. Not long after Klaatu's debut album hit the U.S., rumors started circulating that this was actually an album recorded by The Beatles in a top secret reunion. There were a few purported clues that might've drawn a Beatles-hungry public to that conclusion. The first Klaatu album did not credit the individual band members, and the band did not perform live shows or do press appearances, making it easy to speculate on their "true" identities. The album was released on The Beatles' former label, Capitol Records. And the cover of Ringo Starr's 1974 solo album "Goodnight Vienna" was similarly inspired by "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

Still, I gotta say it's a stretch to pitch "3:47 EST" as a secret Beatles project. It's clearly influenced by The Beatles, but so was every other psych-rock album recorded after 1965. The bass guitar does bear a strong resemblance to Paul McCartney's style, and the vocals are occasionally George Harrison-ish, but beyond that, it's plainly not them. What it is, though, is a very fun, very odd album by a band that eschewed traditional forms of self-promotion. The music is equal turns cheery, corny, and trippy. There's a song about the first subway system, a show tune about a sailor's trip to Hell, a tribute to a heroic lifeguard, and several songs about space. I endorse them all, but we're here to talk about the space part.

The publicity that came with the quickly debunked Beatles rumors landed Klaatu a couple of minor chart hits in 1977. The most notable of these was a very pretty song titled "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft." This was a song inspired by a 1953 event called World Contact Day, in which members of an organization known as the International Flying Saucer Bureau attempted to make contact with extraterrestrial life forms by focusing their collective telepathic energy on a single piece of text. It didn't work.

The lyrics of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" detail the process of sending an interstellar message via deep concentration. It's a hopeful, upbeat song about cooperation across galaxies, which may have been how it caught the ears of The Carpenters. America's favorite soft-rock siblings put out a cover of the Klaatu track that cracked the Top 40 later in 1977 and became an enduring piece of The Carpenters' catalog.

In fact, "Calling Occupants" became such a Carpenters staple that in 1978 it was the basis for "The Carpenters...Space Encounters," an hour-long ABC TV movie/variety show in which a spaceship intercepts footage of a Carpenters performance and sends sexy aliens John Davidson and Suzanne Somers to learn how to incorporate music into their culture. That of course leads to a ton of sub-vaudeville one-liners, a dance number performed by boxy robots in grass skirts, a very '70s sock hop, Richard Carpenter calling a disco square dance for a bunch of aliens in afro wigs, and sundry other waking nightmares.

It's as terrible as it sounds – the endless mugging and sound effects from patently unfunny funnyman Charlie Callas make for some real tooth-grinding torment – but it's also framed as a loose biopic covering The Carpenters' career in the entertainment industry. It's interesting from that angle, and also as a document of Karen Carpenter's effortless onscreen charm, and as a living record of the most 1978 thing that ever happened. It all ends with Karen singing "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" while superimposed over dreadfully animated UFOs, as it would almost have to.

So there you have it, the story of how a Canadian art-rock band accidentally parlayed anonymity, new age thought experiments, and music industry conspiracy theories into worldwide semi-fame, and helped Karen Carpenter usher in a promising new era of televisual peace between the planets.