An absolutely stunning new theory about aliens is making the rounds in the scientific world, and it’s sure to stir up plenty of controversy. Called the “Zoo Theory” and proposed by radio astronomer John A. Ball from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it posits that aliens exist but are avoiding contact with humans.

Ball believes that aliens probably exist and are likely much smarter than humans, but they may not be powerful enough to totally take over the universe. Instead, he argues, they’ve chosen to monitor human activity from a distance, as if we were animals in the zoo and not peers for them to interact with. He said it would explain UFO sightings.

The theory is a proposed answer to what is known as the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the apparent contradiction between the total lack of evidence for the existence of aliens, and yet the extraordinarily high probability of aliens somewhere. The paradox is that if there are so many Earth-like planets out there, and if at some point aliens are likely to develop interstellar travel, they should have been to Earth by now.

“The zoo hypothesis assumes first that a large number of alien cultures exist, and second that these aliens have great reverence for independent, natural evolution and development,” reads an excerpt from Wikipedia. “In particular, assuming that intelligence is a physical process that acts to maximize the diversity of a system’s accessible futures a fundamental motivation for the zoo hypothesis would be that premature contact would “unintelligently” reduce the overall diversity of paths the universe itself could take.”