60-SECOND INTERVIEW : STAR OF `3RD ROCK' DOES YODA STRETCH.

Call him Earth's resident alien, our own flamboyant extraterrestrial. The tall, thin little green man. John Lithgow may be the most versatile creature we have from another planet.

Witness the evidence, beyond the most obvious exhibit, his weekly installments of otherworldly lunacy as Dick Solomon on ``3rd Rock From the Sun'':

Switch on selected National Public Radio stations this month and hear him as the wrinkly, 900-year-old Jedi master, Yoda, part of a new radio dramatization of ``Return of the Jedi.''

The series continues Sundays for the next four weeks, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., on KVCR-FM (91.9) out of San Bernardino. It's also available in bookstores.

Luckily, only the voice box and insight from Lithgow's 6-foot-4-inch frame had to be squeezed into the foot-high Zenster.

``I knew Yoda very well,'' muses Lithgow during a phone interview, ``his sort of wisdom, his sort of caginess, impishness.''

The two characters first merged in 1982, during the radio play of ``The Empire Strikes Back.'' Director John Madden had no Yoda for the series - Frank Oz, the voice of many Muppets, did the movie version - and mentioned this to Lithgow, with whom he was working in the stage play ``Beyond Therapy.''

The lanky Lithgow explains that he had already developed an impersonation of Frank Oz's Grover, an insecure purple monster from ``Sesame Street.''

``When my son was a little boy,'' he says, ``I used to do Grover all the time to amuse him.''

And so Lithgow responded to Madden in the same raspy, Muppet voice: ``Mmmm. No patience has he.'' One of Yoda's lines from ``Empire.'' He got the part.

Now, 14 years later, in the midst of a galaxy-wide revival of all-things-``Star Wars,'' Lithgow joins Ed Asner (Jabba the Hutt), Brock Peters (Darth Vader), Anthony Daniels (once and always C-3PO) and many others for a three-hour ``Jedi'' drama filled with chatty dialogue and classic sound effects.

He even tackles one of the most tearful moments in the ``Star Wars'' trilogy, the death of Luke Skywalker's spry mentor, the end of Yoda.

``It was very poignant,'' he says, ``this lively little devil was growing very old.''

But Lithgow the spaceman lives on. Indeed, many fans forget perhaps his finest, strangest alien act, his evil, operatic Dr. Lizardo in the 1984 cult-comedy ``The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.''

Lithgow's ability to be from outer space, he explains, goes deeper than a green skin sheen.

``I'm such an over-the-top actor,'' he says, ``I brought so much of the trappings of theater into television that I am sort of an alien myself.''

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Photo: John Lithgow provides the voice of the 900-year-old Yoda in the radio dramatization of ``Return of the Jedi'' for National Public Radio.