The infamous child abduction was the Madeleine McCann case of its day. Steven Damman, a toddler left outside a shop on Long Island for ten minutes by his mother, vanished without trace.

Fifty-five years on, as mysteriously as he disappeared, a man bearing a striking resemblance to the toddler’s father has now come forward saying that he is that missing child.

Police are taking the claim seriously and have ordered DNA tests to confirm the man’s identity. “It’s hopeful. We do not really know too much yet,” Jerry Damman, 78, Steven’s father, told The Times from his 300-acre farm in Iowa where he grows corn and beans.

“We would like to find out the answer while we are still alive. It’s been over 50 years,” he said. “You kind of give up hope after all that time. But it may be something. I’ve known about it for some time.”

Mr Damman, who was a 25-year-old airman at Long Island’s Mitchel Field air force base at the time of the abduction, has yet to meet the man who claims to be his long-lost son. Police have told him there appears to be a physical resemblance.

“He apparently put a time-frame together that suggests he may be our boy,” Mr Damman said. “He would like some answers too.”

Steven’s mother, Marilyn, who separated from his father several years after the abduction, is also still alive, though said to be ailing.

Mrs Damman parked a buggy holding Steven’s seven-month-old sister Pamela outside the Food Fair in East Meadow, Long Island, at about 2:45pm on October 31, 1955, with Steven standing next to it, holding a bag of jelly beans.

“There were three or four other carriages with babies in them outside the store,” she told The Saturday Evening Post a year later. “I told Steven to be good, that Mama would be right back, and went in.

“It was something which I had done a thousand times, and other women still do. It is as common to a housewife as cooking eggs for breakfast.”

She came out ten minutes later to find both the pushchair and her children gone.

Mrs Damman, then 22, told Newsday, the local paper, that her son could not have moved the pushchair alone.

“I don’t think he knows where the brake is,” she said. “He never wanders. He’s kind of a momma’s boy.”

A neighbour found the pushchair around the corner with Pamela inside, not far from the Damman’s home.

But Steven, who was just two months shy of his third birthday, had vanished with his jelly beans. No one has ever explained why Pamela was left behind.

Under the front-page headline “Fear Missing Boy Kidnapped,” Newsday reported the following day that more than 5,000 volunteers had searched the area for Steven.

One witness claimed to have seen six people “pick up the boy” from in front of the supermarket. The case earned such notoriety that when a young boy’s body turned up buried in a cardboard box in Philadelphia two years later, everyone assumed it was Steven. DNA tests finally proved decades later that Steven was not the infamous “Boy in the Box.”

According to the New York Daily News, the Michigan man approached Long Island police in March claiming to be Steven Damman.

Mr Damman said that the man who claims to be his son had apparently never felt part of the family that raised him and went in search of answers. After examining adoptions and missing-person cases, he came to suspect he was the missing Long Island boy because of his family’s former ties to the area.

“They apparently had been on Long Island. That’s what I understand,” Mr Damman said.

Police have not identified the Michigan man. It could take the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Virginia, up to a month to complete the DNA tests.

Mr Damman, who remarried, says that the abduction is seldom far from his thoughts.

“It’s always at the back of your mind,” he said. “We never knew what happened. We may never know the whole truth.”

Lost and found

• Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl who disappeared in 1998 aged 10, escaped eight years later from her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, who had kept her in a dungeon for eight years. She now hosts a TV talk show and owns the house where she was imprisoned

• Natasha Ryan, 14, ran away from home in Australia in 1998. After a police search a man was charged with her murder. Five years later police found her hiding in a cupboard in the house she shared with her boyfriend. They have since married

• In 2007 police searching for missing William Ownby, 13, found him and Shawn Hornbeck, 17, who had been missing for five years, in a flat in St Louis, Missouri. A man was charged with kidnapping

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