It was an extraordinary tale of survival against the odds that fascinated experts and captivated the public.

From the snowy forests of northern Sweden, where temperatures have been regularly below -22F (-30ºC), there emerged last week a man who claimed to have survived for over two months inside his frosty car, trapped beneath the snow.

The story of Peter Skyllberg's survival was hailed as "the case of a lifetime" by Swedish doctors, while outdoor experts were amazed that someone could endure such inhospitable conditions for so long.

But now questions are being raised about the veracity of his tale.

One of his rescuers has told The Sunday Telegraph that he believes the car in which he was trapped was never completely sealed shut by snow, while other local residents claim that it would have been easy for him to escape if he wanted to.

"It wasn't snowed in. Not the right passenger door," said Andreas Gidlund, one of the two traffic policemen who pulled Mr Skyllberg's emaciated body from the vehicle. "If you look at the back door, on the left side, it was very compacted snow – but on the right side, it was very loose snow.

"So I imagine that is the place where he had been going out. There wasn't as much snow there as there was on the other side. It had been opened every now and then."

But other people involved in the initial rescue maintain that he was indeed trapped – and that his miraculous story of survival is, as initially seemed, astounding but true.

What is not in doubt is that Mr Skyllberg had chosen a rather unconventional lifestyle.

The 44-year-old had been living in his car since May, when he disappeared from his home in Karlskoga, central Sweden. He had worked as a handy man for a local landlord in the iron-manufacturing town, and the landlord gave him one of his flats where he lived for a time with a girlfriend.

The crisis came when he decided to go into the property business himself, buying a building from his employer with borrowed money. He then poured his savings into renovating the property, but could not service the debt of £150,000, and last year it was repossessed.

"He had got into a lot of debt, and he couldn't pay his bills, and then he just disappeared," said Magnus Jernberg, who was Mr Skyllberg's neighbour in Karlskoga until just over a year ago. He described him as "a very odd guy".

"It was a bit of a joke for us. We said 'Oh, I think they just found Peter'. And then it was Peter."

He added: "He had a girlfriend, I think she lived with him for a while. But she ran out."

Having abandoned his debts and failed relationships in Karlskoga, Mr Skyllberg then appeared in Umea – a lively university town 400 miles north of Stockholm, traditionally known as the last major settlement before the wilderness begins.

Mr Skyllberg kept himself to himself, living in his car in the forest. But local people say he did not look like a tramp, and did not arouse suspicion. Till receipts found in his car show that, on December 15, he went into a shop to buy magazines and coffee. But then he disappeared.

The failure to notice his absence has surprised some, but family members have told The Sunday Telegraph that he had not spoken to them for over 20 years.

Siv Skyllberg, Mr Skyllberg's aunt, said that he had broken off relations with his family two decades ago after a family scandal, which she refuses to explain.

"The scandal was a lie, but when the truth came out, the damage was already done," is all she would say. "We couldn't do anything about it."

Even last week, she said, when Peter Skyllberg's father Lars telephoned the hospital to speak to his son, he refused to take the call.

He was a loner even before the rupture, she said. When she used to babysit for him, more than thirty years ago, he rarely played with his five siblings. "He stayed away from the other children. He used to read a lot and that kind of stuff."

And the hardy inhabitants of the northern outpost are bemused that Mr Skyllenberg did not make it out of his car and seek civilisation.

Andreas Ostensson runs the local petrol station, and is the only person in the village who remembers meeting Mr Skyllberg, who came in regularly in the summer to buy cigarettes, coffee and bread, while he was living in a tent in the forest.

"If you look on the map," he said, pointing out red tracks crossing near the spot, "all those are snowmobile roads. He must have had at least a thousand snowmobiles pass him, and no one saw anything. It's very strange."

Others find it difficult to believe that, only a mile from the road, he was unable to get out of his car and seek help before he became too ill to move. At the car, you can hear frequent revving from the many snowmobiles which buzz up and down the nearly trails. It's a trek of less than a mile to the main road – although the snow is well over three feet thick.

Roger Vesterlund, from the local snowmobile club, says that one of the club's members did indeed find the car in mid-January and reported it to the police.

"He was at the car a month ago, and he was trying to get into the car. All the doors were locked and he knocked on the windows and didn't see anything. He took the plate number and he gave it to the police, but the police only confirmed that it was not stolen, and that it was parked in a crazy place."

The frost-coated interior is a depressing testament to Mr Skyllberg's isolation. It is littered with old paper cups, used tissues, and empty cigarette packets.

There's an empty bottle of beer, some rolling tobacco, and a home-made pipe. There are camping pans, rolls of kitchen towel, a sleeping bag, a large coolbox, and a bumper pack of extra-large nappies.

"He wanted to die, man," said Joakim Johansson, a pony-tailed local who had taken his snowmobile to the forest turning-circle where the car is still trapped.

"If he was here from 19 December, that's legendary," he added, shaking his head. "Of course not eating, but also no water, because you can't just eat snow. That would chill the body out much too fast."

Conrad Allen, chief instructor of Trueways Survival, who regularly organises Arctic Survival courses, said that people could last for a long time without food, provided that they had access to water. But he said that his decision to remain inside the car, which as a metal object would only get colder, would have made his experience all the more gruelling.

"When people are trapped in snowy areas, we teach them to build a snow hole for shelter, and tell them to light a candle to check there is enough oxygen," said Mr Allen.

"If the candle begins to flicker, then they should stick their ski pole out into the air to allow more ventilation. If the snow was very densely packed then it would be a problem having enough air, but if this man was snowed in there and survived it means that the snow was light enough for air to filter through.

"The fact that he was smoking in there doesn't surprise me – people often resort to cigarettes at times of stress.

"What is more surprising is the idea of the man lying there, doing nothing, and just smoking. It's unusual for him not to try to see a way out or draw attention to himself."

Furthermore, when he was discovered a week ago, Mr Skyllberg initially tried to send Mr Gidlund and his colleague Torbjorn Lundgren away, telling them: "I wanted to hibernate." He was so thin by the time he was rescued that his upper arms were only the thickness of Mr Gidlund's wrists.

For a moment, he said, he and his colleague had debated whether to leave him, as he requested. But the appalling smell in the car convinced them that if they allowed him to stay, he would surely die.

"He had some clothes on; tracksuit bottoms, T-shirts and a couple of not-very-warm jumpers, but he also had a pair of ski trousers and a woolly hat that he wasn't wearing. It was freezing cold but he hadn't put all his clothes on."

Other locals, however, still believe the original story that the car was snowed in for over two months.

"I think he was trapped," said Erik Ostman, one of the firemen who brought Mr Skyllberg from the car in a tank-tracked off-road vehicle. "When we arrived, there had only been two scooters who'd driven there, so the road was pretty untouched. The snow was maybe 70cm deep."

Mr Ostensson, the garage attendant, remembers finding something odd about him when he first admitted that he was living in a tent in the woods.

"I asked him, 'Where do you pitch your tent?' And he said he pitched it in the forest, and then he became pretty interesting to me. That's not so usual for our customers. Then I asked 'When are you going home?' and he had no answer.

"Well, when I'm away from my family by myself, I have at least a date for when I'm coming back."

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