There's some controversy over Walt Disney's parenthood. What is it

Q. Huh

A. Yep. There is a striking resemblance between Mickey Mouse's creator and Gines Carillo, a doctor who grew up in the Spanish village of Mojacar. As a 20-year-old he was said by villagers to have conducted an affair with an attractive washerwoman called Isabel Zamora Ascensio - nicknamed La Bicha - producing a baby boy from their liaison.

Q. Jose Guirao

A. So it is said. His mother reportedly whisked the baby off to Chicago, to be adopted by Elias Disney in 1901 and to be baptised a second time in June, 1902, as Walter Elias Disney. Officials at the Disney studios in Burbank, California, reacted angrily to the reports.

Q. So what's the evidence

A. Diego Carillo, 79, a legitimate son of the doctor, said his father had always denied the affair 'but he thought it was amusing'. And the doctor's brother, he said, looked even more like Walt.

Q. So who's spreading all this

A. Christopher Jones, whose father Tom was a press agent for Disney, is writing a book intended to show that Jose Guirao and Disney were the same person. Isabel Zamora Ascensio went to America, where her brother lived in Chicago. He apparently knew the Disneys, who had three sons and agreed to look after her little boy.

Q. How was this all hushed up

A. Simply, there were few people who knew - and they didn't want to tell.

Q. Didn't Walt suspect

A. It's possible. He became worried about his parentage when he discovered that although he had been baptised, his birth had never been registered. He then asked J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, to help trace his origins.

Q. Hoover Surely that's the last person her should have asked

A. Yes, the idea of putting family secrets into the hands of a manipulating blackmailer is a bizarre one. However, Disney had agreed to become an informer for the FBI - in America's communist witch-hunts.

Q. So what did the FBI do in return

A. It's not fully clear - but it looks as though they may have covered some of Disney's tracks. According to Jose Acosta, 71, who lives a few miles north of Mojacar, his uncle was priest for the area in 1940 when two Americans arrived in the obscure village, asking questions about Jose Guirao. 'They asked my uncle to help find details about his birth. He found a reference in the parish records ... a few days later he looked at the book again and found that the page had been torn out. He was convinced that they had come not to find out about the boy's birth but to destroy any trace of it.'

To ask a question about People & Places, click here

By Steve Cunningham