The sudden disappearance of Malaysian Air Flight 370 has captivated the international community and sparked many a critic and conspiracy theorist.

But Rick Matthews, director of the National Center for Security and Preparedness at the University of Albany, has a theory that Flight 370 became a one of a kind hijacking turned kidnapping.

Matthews theory builds upon the plane was hijacked and then landed somewhere.

“The theory is that, by deduction, is that if you rule out the fact that the plane crashed…that means the plane has to have landed somewhere and if it lands somewhere, people are going to hear about it right away,” he said. “Or someone is, for lack of a better word, hiding it.”

But why?

“They want something in return for that, i.e., ransom,” Matthews explained. “Either for the plane, for the passengers or for both and that presents an interesting motive, if you will, for hijacking a plane and keeping it someplace hidden from the public.”

Matthews said that if ransom is not the ulterior motive, then a more nefarious use for keeping the plane hidden is a scarier scenario.

“I don’t know of any group that’s done this, nobody’s done this that we know of,” Matthews said. “There’s no terrorist organization that has done this.”

Even if the plane was deliberately hijacked, as Malaysian officials have declared, Matthews believes this was not the orchestration of one or two people.

“It requires a great deal of coordination, it requires several people, if you will, to make this all happen both in the air and on the ground,” he said.

A network of enough people where even “cell phone issues would have been dealt with in the air,” which goes to the theory the event was orchestrated.

And if the passengers remain alive, Matthews thinks no one has yet heard from them, because they are being moved away from the plane’s location.

“There has to be a progress to get the passengers away from the plane, sequestered somewhere else, and the hijackers, too. That’s going to take some time,” he said. “You don’t move 200 to 300 people simply, so, to do that, means you have to that over a period of time.”

If the hijacking theory proves accurate, the big question is why the captors have yet to be heard from.

“It would imply to me that the hijackers don’t want to get caught,” he said. “They want to have a way out and to do that, they have to get away from the place and keep the passengers away from it.”