Unfortunately this kind of "mis-reading" happens all the time. It's sort of like an illusion. People sometimes tend to see what they expect to see. Almost always when people lose images on the CF cards, it is different than your experience and so people just read one thing but process it as something that they are familiar with. In other words they get so caught up with the "dancing bear" that they don't see the real work.
As for how to process the images you now have that you can't open, it will probably require someone who understands the format for those images and can discern and reassemble the pieces that they can identify. Often just a few bytes have been garbled and if one can correct those few bytes, then the image might magically allow itself to be opened again. I used to to this with Btrieve database files that got corrupted. It was often just the header info that was bad and after it was reconstructed, the data was all accessible again.
I hope you can find the right people who know the underlying format of the images. By the way, if they are JPG, then that is a well documented format. But if they are RAW, then you may be in for some problems as many of the RAW formats are proprietary. Good luck!
Cheers,
rfs
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