Two men were best friends for 60 years before making life-changing discovery

There’s nothing like making friends with someone who you feel like you’ve known your whole life. You know, when you just click?

The kind of friendship where the ‘brother from another mother’ or ‘sister from another mister’ saying kicks in.

And these two men were best friends for 60 years before they made a life-changing discovery that changed that phrase entirely.

Alan Robinson and Walter MacFarlane had first become mates when played football together at prep school in Hawaii. But despite living less than 10 miles apart for most of their lives, it wasn’t until 2017 when they realised how close they really are.

The pair had been friends for decades. (Steve TV/YouTube)

While Robinson was adopted, MacFarlane never knew his father and his daughter, Cindy, really wanted to help him find out about him.

So, he used a DNA test to find out about his ancestry and found a match.

Turns out, someone had identical X chromosomes with MacFarlane, a user named Robi737.

Cindy said on Steve TV there were ‘over a thousand DNA matches’ and when she sought out the highest match, it listed Robi737 as ‘close family or sibling’.

“And my mum said to tell dad to call uncle Alan because he flew 737s as a pilot for Aloha Airlines and everyone called him Robbie as a nickname,” she explained.

But yep, you guessed it, Robi737 was in fact the username of Robinson on the site.

“When we got the results back it was discovered that Alan wasn’t only my best friend, he was my brother,” he said.

Really completing the saying, it turns out the pair do in fact share the same birth mother.

The pair told Sky News it had been an ‘overwhelming experience’ calling it the ‘best Christmas present’ at the time.

"I had a younger brother that I lost when he was 19, so I never had nieces or nephews. I thought I'll never know my birth mother, I'll never have any nieces or nephews,” Robinson explained.

And despite MacFarlane occasionally thinking they did look ‘a little bit’ alike, it never crossed either man’s mind that they may be related.

When they told their families, they told Steve TV there wasn’t ‘a dry eye in the whole place’.

Well, friends for 60 years but brothers for life it turns out. Now, that is an emotional one.