The cover art for Kesha’s comeback album, Rainbow, depicts a fleet of little red UFOs above the back of a naked Kesha. A song called “Spaceship” will also feature on the album, and it was recently revealed that the inspiration for these extraterrestrial references comes directly from a UFO experience the singer claims to have had. In an interview on the Zach Sang Show, Kesha said that while in the desert once, she saw what looked like “little balls of fire in the sky”. She said: “I was in Joshua Tree, totally sober, let me preface – completely fucking sober – I think people would be like, ‘she was on acid’ or something. I wasn’t. I was on nothing. I was a totally sober Sally, just a lady in the desert,” she added, “I look up in the sky and there's a bunch of spaceships.”

She continued: “I swear to God, there were like five to seven, and I don’t know why I didn’t like try to take a picture of it – I just looked at it. I was sitting on a rock, and I was like, ‘what in the hell is that?’ I was trying to figure it out, and then they went away. And then they came back.” She said that they came back “in a different formation” and that she thought immediately, “‘those are fucking aliens.' They were spaceships!"

Fans of the singer won’t necessarily be surprised by the revelation – Kesha has a long relationship with the extraterrestrial. She has a UFO tattoo on her wrist, a planet on her hand, and regularly posts references to alien abduction. It’s likely that her Joshua Tree visitors were just scoping her out to take her on a trip back home.

You can watch the full interview, in which Kesha talk about not only her close encounter but her new music and evolving as an artist and a person, below.