The photo was taken by Life Magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstadt.

Carl Muscarello, an ex-NYC cop, has long claimed he was the sailor in the picture. Now, according to CBS News, technology tests seem to support his claim.

A team of volunteers from the Naval War College, in Newport, contacted the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, of Cambridge, Mass., last year after hearing about a computer program that its scientists designed to"age" missing children and fugitive criminals.

The team was led by retired Navy Capt. Jerry O'Donnell, Mendonsa's neighbor since 1999. He'd heard the older man's tale and was intrigued by what he said.

"There are a lot of people in history who claimed to be the kissing sailor, but nobody has come up with any hard evidence," said O'Donnell, who works at the Navy Warfare Development Command."We decided we wanted to use cutting-edge technology to find the answer."

So on a winter day this year, Mendonsa went to the Mitsubishi lab, where he was placed in a chair surrounded by 150 bright lights, 16 cameras and 16 state-of-the-art computers.

In less than a minute, more than 4,000 digital images of Mendonsa were taken, which were then used to create a 3-D model of his face.

The lab was then able to"de-age" the present-day Mendonsa and transfer his face to a copy of Eisenstadt's photo from 1945.

The man in the original photo and his counterpart in the reproduction appear nearly identical.

Click on the link above for a video of the CBS News story.

Click here for an article in the Providence Journal.