The saddle node bifurcation (SNB) and the distance voltage instability are valuable information in power system planning and operation. This paper presents a new efficient, robust and unified strategy to compute the SNB by the combined use of the continuation power flow (CPF), Point of Collapse (PoC) method, and the method of a pair of multiple load flow solutions (PMLFS) with Lagrange interpolation utilizing only their advantages: the approximate nose curves and critical loading are determined fast by Lagrange-interpolating two stable and two unstable solutions obtained by using the robust CPF and PMLFS; the exact SNB is computed by the quadratically converging PoC method. The proposed method has been tested on Klos-Kerner 11-bus, New England 30-bus, IEEE 118-bus and KEPCO 791-bus systems. The method is found to be so efficient that computation time for determining the SNB of the KEPCO 791-bus system is 17.82 sec by a notebook PC with 300 MHz Pentium processor.