University of Adelaide Professor Derek Abbott says DNA testing from hairs of the Somerton Man reveals him as Carl “Charles” Webb, an engineer born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria.

Webb was one of six siblings and had no children, Abbott said. He was also separated from his wife and was the only member of his family without a date of death, Abbott said.

Abbott, who has been attempting to identify the Somerton Man with a team of researchers for the last 15 years, says he is “99.9 per cent confident” of the man’s identity.

He said the breakthrough came from DNA testing a piece of the Somerton Man’s hair which was given to him by the police museum in 2011.

“We’ve been at the uni trying to extract DNA from it all these years – it’s a very tough problem getting it out of old hair, but the technology has improved dramatically over the years,” he told Fiveaa on Tuesday night.

“Finally, we’ve had enough refinement that by about February this year we were ready to go and use that DNA to find a nearest cousin to the Somerton Man.

The Somerton Man

“The way that works is many people in the world submit their DNA to companies like Ancestry.com etc. to have their DNA tested so they can find their relatives to put on their family tree.

“So using that methodology, we were able to find a very distant cousin on his father’s side, and then by building out that family tree, that’s how we discovered Carl Webb, which we believe is the name of the Somerton Man.”

Abbott said electoral roll records reveal Webb was “an instrument maker” dealing with electrics.

“This explains why the Somerton Man had in his suitcase a couple of strange items like a table knife that had be ground down to a point, and a normal scissors that had been ground down to a point,” he said.

Excavation of the Somerton Man’s grave in May 2021. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

Forensic Science SA, which is currently analysing the exhumed remains of the Somerton Man, is yet to corroborate the findings.

The Somerton Man’s body was found on Somerton Beach on December 1, 1948. No cause of death was found and he has never been identified, but a scrap of a Persian phrase “tamám shud” – translating to “ended” or “finished” – was found in his pocket.

Months after his burial at West Terrace Cemetery, police found the book from which the phrase was cut. The book had a code written on its back page which is yet to be cracked – fuelling speculation the man was a Cold War spy.

The man’s body was exhumed from his West Terrace grave in May last year in a bid to solve the decades old mystery.