To quote from there:

"The Wheel of Fire", an unproduced Galactica 1980 episode, reveals that Starbuck was eventually rescued by the beings from the Ship of Lights and that the entire affair of Starbuck finding Angela, delivering her child, and sending him to the Colonial Fleet was engineered by them, to test whether Starbuck was worthy to join them. Starbuck passes the test and becomes one of the Ship's crew.

The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series episode "You Can't Go Home Again" gives a nod to this episode. In the episode, Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace crashes on a deserted planet and must repair a Cylon Raider to rejoin the fleet.

Starbuck reappears in Richard Hatch's original Galactica novels, described as still the best pilot in the fleet, even though over 10 yahren have passed since the last episode and the start of the novel series.

So Starbuck was not only saved, he got an evolutionary promotion - wheh!

It looks like Ron Moore took some of the elements of the angelic beings
from the Ship of Lights who were in the original BSG for his whole "God"
and "angels" bit. Somehow, though, it just didn't work, perhaps because
it felt so tacked on at the end rather than being more obvious in
earlier episodes.