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So, I conclude that either she is for real, or else National Geographic is more corrupt than I could imagine.

I do not believe it is like that. I mean, I do not believe there is necessarily an intention to deceive. I have no idea how the details that convinced those who are convinced, came about, but I do know that such details can easily be created, not with the intent to deceive, but to make everything "fit" a preconceived notion.

I do not doubt that there were reasons to believe these two women were actually the one and same, but, I believe, once the conviction was accepted, those interested probably worked harder at corroborating the belief than rigorously testing it. For one thing, except for the story, there is nothing else at stake.

If they happen to be right, than I will be surprised, but not dissappointed. If they happen to be wrong, it does little harm. I just happen to believe they are wrong, but I am not convinced their motives were necessarily wrong, at least on this issue.

Hank

The only other detail I would point out, of some relevance to your thesis, is that the estimation of a person "match" was done by three separate organizations, outside of National Geographic's own experience with the woman's testimony:

1) A facial recognition company (that uses facial metrics as the means of correlation) had the teen's face added to the database of hundreds of thousands, and then checked if the adult face drew that as a match. While it did not come up as the best match, it was in the top 20 or so in the category of "worth a second look by human analyst"

2) The FBI analyst, though initially skeptical (because of the presumed facial mole of which you spoke) was eventually convinced (then again, he had access to all data on which to base his decision)

3) as I said before, the iris scanning software company was contracted to do the match. Once they had a crisp photo to work with of the new woman, their software put the odds at 1 in 100 million that the adult was not the same as the earlier photo.

So, I point this out only to say that, there would have to be many preconceived notions to fool all these people, working for four different agencies.