Don Donderi, PhD. – The American Personality Inventory (API): A test to evaluate abduction reports
The American Personality Inventory (API) is a test that was developed by Ted Davis, Budd Hopkins and Don Donderi to assess the validity of a report that someone has been abducted by extraterrestrials. It consists of 65 true-false questions and can be completed in about ten minutes either on paper or on a digital device. To develop the API, we compared the answers to 608 true-false questions from 52 people whose abduction narratives were verified by researchers like Hopkins and David Jacobs to the answers from two other groups of people. One group – 75 “controls” – were people who we simply asked to help us “develop a new personality test” but who we had no reason to believe had been abducted.
Another group – 26 “simulators” – were people whom we were sure knew about the ET abduction phenomenon but whom we had no reason to believe had been abducted. We asked the people in this group to complete the API “as if” they had been abducted. Using a statistical tool called multivariate discriminant analysis, we were able to classify each person into one of the three groups: abductees, controls or simulators – based on the pattern of their responses to each of 65 of the original 608 true-false questions. We report here the results of an analysis of 138 more people who completed to the 65-question API, and who had also completed the online Experiencer Survey that is managed by the MUFON Experiencer Research Team.
