In a dizzying matter of hours this week, the story of John Barnes, a local man who said he thought he was abducted as a toddler from his real parents outside grocery store on New York's Long Island in the 1950s, bubbled forth in this pine-filled Michigan village of a few thousand people and raced onto a national television stage. Barnes, a quiet, polite, unemployed man whose wife works at a local grocery store, said he had long felt different from the people he was told were his parents and siblings. He had been pondering his origins for years, and his Internet research led him to the sister of a child kidnapped decades ago and miles away. By Wednesday, reporters from around the country swarmed this quiet village known for snowmobiling and fishing. On Thursday morning, Barnes told his story on NBC's 'Today' show, along with his would-be sister. And Thursday night, federal authorities announced that DNA tests showed that Barnes was not the boy who had been kidnapped, and people here concluded that he was, in all likelihood, just John Barnes of Kalkaska after all. By then, though, the story had captivated residents of Kalkaska -- some hopeful that it was true, others smirking at it all along. It also left a giant rift within the Barnes family, who said they learned of their relative's puzzling claim only when reporters began appearing at their doors. 'It's a mystery to me,' Lynn Jenkins, a 76-year-old potato farmer, said to his friends inside the Trout Town Country Cafe on Thursday morning. The group debated whether Barnes' blond hair and bone structure matched the Barnes family's looks, talked about what kind of DNA testing might persuade them either way, and pondered how, if the story were true, the Barnes family would have ended up with a kidnapped child. There have been many leads over the years in the case of Steven Damman, who was 2 years and 10 months old when he vanished on Oct. 31, 1955, from outside the East Meadow, N.Y., grocery store as his mother shopped inside. The boy's sister, Pamela, a 7-month-old baby, left in a carriage beside him, was not taken. At the time, the case drew enormous notice. Bloodhounds and 2,000 people searched for the boy, while sound trucks broadcast his description and people were told to search their vehicles' trunks. False sightings and fake ransom notes came. Hundreds of people called in tips, none of which led to an answer. As the years went by, the kidnapping rarely was discussed within the Damman family. But a few months ago, Pamela Damman Horne, Steven's sister, now in her 50s, received a hand-written letter and a clump of photographs from Barnes, a stranger. Horne and Barnes submitted to a private, preliminary DNA test which, authorities say, did not rule out the possibility they were related and which led to the more sophisticated FBI tests. On Thursday, Barnes told NBC's 'Today' show about his long-held feelings about the Barnes family. 'I just knew I didn't come from these people,' he said. But at the home of Dick Barnes, 75, who raised John Barnes along with an older brother, Richard Jr., and a younger sister, Cheryl, the claims seemed astounding and absurd. Cheryl Barnes, 50, found herself greeting reporters at her father's front porch and trying to prove that her brother was her brother. 'This is all out of nowhere,' she said. 'He's always saying something, and now it's this? Is he saying our dad is a kidnapper?' In town, Josh Perttunen, the editor of the local newspaper, The Leader and the Kalkaskian, said he believed most locals had hoped the story would prove true. 'I think we've all had a moment in our lives where we didn't fit in,' Perttunen said. By Thursday's end, though, the answer had reached Kalkaska and well beyond. In Newton, Iowa, Jerry Damman, the father of the boy who vanished, sounded tired. 'I have mixed feelings about this,' said Damman, 78. 'Naturally, it's a disappointment in some ways.' 