In 1994 Jeffrey Uhlmann noted that the EKF takes a nonlinear function and partial distribution information (in the form of a mean and covariance estimate) of the state of a system but applies an approximation to the known function rather than to the imprecisely-known probability distribution.
In other words, the given mean and covariance information can be exactly encoded in a set of points, referred to as sigma points, which if treated as elements of a discrete probability distribution has mean and covariance equal to the given mean and covariance.