The world-famous AP photo of Kim Phuc — “The Terror of War,” known popularly as “Napalm Girl” — was taken on June 8, 1972, and credited to Nick Ut, a young Vietnamese AP staffer working in the Saigon bureau. The image is among the most recognized and celebrated works of photojournalism of the 20th Century.

The photo was shot during a well-documented attack on the village of Trang Bang witnessed by many journalists for competing news organizations who, at no point over the past half century, publicly called into question Ut’s authorship of the photo. Many have written, reported and publicly spoken about their time in Vietnam, while never disputing the provenance of perhaps the most famous photo of the war.

For the past six months, aware that a film challenging this historical record was in production, the AP has conducted its own painstaking research, which supports the historical account that Ut was the photographer. In the absence of new, convincing evidence to the contrary, the AP has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo. The famous image is formally titled “The Terror of War.”