Mother Certain 2nd Photo of MIA Son Is Real : POWs: Her conviction has received some scientific bolstering. Senate hearings on U.S. efforts to locate missing servicemen open today.

One Sunday afternoon last July, Gladys Fleckenstein sat in a friend’s living room gazing intently at a color photograph of a paunchy, middle-aged man standing before a grass-roofed building, his right arm around an Asian woman.

Though she had not seen him in nearly 23 years, Fleckenstein was certain that she recognized the man. She was sure that he was her son, Lt. Cmdr. Larry J. Stevens, a Navy jet pilot from Canoga Park. He had been declared missing in action after being shot down during an attack on a North Vietnamese truck convoy on Valentine’s Day, 1969.

“I thought: ‘My God, he is alive,’ ” Fleckenstein said Monday. “I’ve known he’s alive all these years, just knew it. But now I’ve got the proof. I’ve got the real proof.”

Fleckenstein’s maternal certainty got some scientific bolstering over the weekend when a Colorado State University forensic anthropology expert said he had identified the man in the photo as Stevens by comparing it to a black-and-white photo of the pilot taken the year he disappeared.

“It is one and the same person,” Michael Charney, 80, a specialist in identifying human remains and people in photos, said Monday. Stevens is among the 2,200 U.S. servicemen listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War.

Charney’s comments came as the U.S. Senate prepared to open a series of hearings today on the adequacy of the U.S. government’s efforts to locate and retrieve U.S. servicemen missing in Southeast Asia.

The Senate Select Committee for POW/MIA Affairs was formed after the release in July of a series of photos purportedly showing American POWs, including another one supposedly of Stevens. Fleckenstein said she is positive that both photos show her son.

The government has dismissed the first photo as a fake, and Pentagon officials have refused to comment on the second snapshot.

Fleckenstein, 70, is scheduled to testify before the Senate committee Thursday along with a Tennessee circuit court judge who obtained the current purported photo of Stevens with the aid of his bailiff, a former captain in the Royal Laotian Army.

The judge, Hamilton Gayden, said Monday that the current photo of Stevens was taken last year at a camp for American prisoners on Savoy Island in Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, site of a giant U.S. military installation during the Vietnam War.

The photo clearly shows a middle-aged Caucasian man wearing glasses, a light-colored polo shirt, pants and a wristwatch. If alive, Stevens would be 49 next month.

Gayden said the photo was shot by the Vietnamese prison commander and that the woman in the picture is the commander’s wife. Gayden said the photo was smuggled out of Vietnam by a Laotian businessman and mailed to his bailiff from Thailand.

Navy Cmdr. Greg Hartung, a Pentagon spokesman, said Defense Department authorities plan to conduct their own comparison of the photos but have not done so.

“We don’t know who’s in it, and the investigation is ongoing,” he said.

Frances Zwenig, the Senate committee’s staff director, said Fleckenstein and Gayden are expected to play key roles in the hearings, providing case-study examples of the government’s handling of MIA cases in which there is some documentary evidence.

Also scheduled to testify are relatives of other MIAs, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Bill Bell, chief of the U.S. government’s POW/MIA office in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.

Fleckenstein said she plans to “pound on the government” to increase its efforts to locate American servicemen who relatives believe are still held by Hanoi and get them released.

“I’m going to tell them: ‘I want you to go in and bring my son home, and the rest of the men. I know he’s alive, and you know he’s alive,’ ” she said.

Charney said a mechanical engineer at Colorado State used a computer scanner to produce outlines of the facial features of the men in the color and black-and-white photos. Charney then superimposed one image onto another and they matched within 0.01 of an inch, he said.