Florida man Peter Shatner learns his father was the other guy, not the actor who first played Captain James T. Kirk

Peter Shatner has learned he isn’t.

And that might be the best birthday present he could have asked for.

The Florida man who has long claimed actor William Shatner as his father, based on information provided by his late mother years ago, has passed the final frontier. A DNA test from the daughter of another father candidate, a man his birth mother remembered as Chick, proved a match.

“I finally know where I come from,” Shatner, who will turn 64 next Wednesday, told the Tampa Bay Times.

It was a decades-long journey during which Peter Shatner, who last year had his name legally changed from his adoptive surname Sloan, tried to get the venerated actor best known for playing Captain James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” series to admit his brief affair with Kathy McNeil, a Canadian actress who has since died.

Chick was a nickname for Benjamin Freedman, a Canadian citizen who died in 2001, the Tampa Bay Times said. Shatner’s birth mother had indicated the father was either him, or Shatner. She had slept with both at around the same time.

Shatner told the Tampa Bay Times that he will probably change his name back to Sloan, now that he knows his origins.

“It was never about wanting his money, and I always made it clear I would renounce any inheritance in exchange for a DNA test,” Shatner told the newspaper of the actor whom he dogged for years, including with a $170 million paternity lawsuit in 2016 that was later dismissed. “If you are not adopted, you could never understand. I had to know who I am.”

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