Well, we’re embarrassed. On behalf of the entire search-and-rescue community—this one’s on us. It seems that we did find Amelia Earhart, roughly two weeks after her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean, in 1937, but we didn’t recognize her because she had really gone to town on her bangs.

How did this happen? We’re not trying to make excuses here, but bang length can significantly alter one’s perception of a face’s shape and proportions. So, when our team touched down on a remote island early in their efforts to recover Earhart’s plane, and went swimming and fishing and shared a few beers with a nice girl from Kansas with blunt bangs, they didn’t think anything of it.

This woman’s face appeared significantly shorter than that of the woman in the “Missing” posters. That’s what blunt bangs do, you know? They shorten the face.

This woman had built a lovely life for herself. Her dearest friends were some neighborly coconut crabs. The twisted metal structure she called home seemed less like a downed aircraft and more like a unique, potentially valuable Frank Lloyd Wright experiment. Can we really blame the search-and-rescue team for its oversight? By all accounts this woman was happy! She likely lived a long, fulfilling life on that island after the team left. They said that she was in great spirits as they prepared to depart, even telling jokes like “I want to come with you!” and “That’s me in those pictures!” The team just laughed at the woman with the blunt bangs and the short face who looked nothing like the gal in the photos—why would she want to leave paradise?

Of course, today we are not laughing. Several journalists have already asked questions such as “Didn’t Amelia Earhart have bangs when she left?” Well, you’re only exposing your own ignorance there. There are many types of bangs, including sideswept and curtain. There are baby bangs, thick bangs, and wispy bangs. Sure, maybe when she left, her hair had been hinting at a bang, but every report the search-and-rescue team sent back to HQ described a blunt bang. We cannot stress enough how blunt the bang was.

Naturally, your next question might be: “Why did Amelia Earhart, after crashing her plane, trim her bangs?” It’s quite simple, really. To emergency-land one’s aircraft during what was supposed to be a highly publicized global circumnavigation would be a very emotional experience. It is possible Ms. Earhart believed that sense memory was stored in the hair (a popular idea at the time), and that only by shedding that which covered her forehead could she put the memory of the crash behind her and move unburdened into her new island life. Another theory is that she just liked the way it looked. Maybe she was thinking about a change anyway. Perhaps this abrupt disruption to her life style was a catalyst for reinventing herself. Scientists are still investigating.

Once again, on behalf of the search-and-rescue community, the scientific community, and some of the more credible conspiracy theorists, I want to say that we are truly sorry. None of the flight logs, none of the radio transmissions, and none of the interviews that we conducted with family and friends indicated that Ms. Earhart had a desire to dramatically cut her bangs.

Perhaps we can never truly know the ones we love.

All we can do now is issue a warning: If you go missing and then get very blunt bangs, your face shape will appear to have changed. Perhaps so much so that we will be unable to find you. Be safe out there. ♦