I first became aware of the crosshairs mark phenomenon while watching an interview with Stanford scientist Garry Nolan, who gave an account of a UFO sighting that mysteriously did not show up in photographs.

Interested, I looked up the case and found a presentation by legendary UFO researcher Jaques Vallée (Vallée 2020). The disappearing UFO part of it was discussed, but what caught my attention was that the witness had, eight months earlier, discovered a strange mark on her hip. It looked like the image in Figure 1.¹

 

It was described as a “crosshair,” although it was only a part of one. Vallée’s next slide showed an array of similar marks that had apparently been found by people (mostly women) around the world. They all looked something like a crosshair, with two or more concentric circles and a variety of lines radiating out from the middle.

 

At this point, I read the comments below the video. One of them pointed out that the shape of the marks resembled the front of a hairdryer. Aha! I thought, pausing the video. That was all it was. Vallée had simply overlooked this very straightforward explanation. The mark on the woman in Vallée’s presentation did indeed look like a superficial burn that was a few days old. It, and the other images, also quite closely resembled the front grills of a variety of hairdryers.

So I started to do some research. I googled “Hairdryer burns” and found a paper in the International Journal of Legal Medicine that showed a very similar image. I posted this on Twitter, with a comment (perhaps overly flippant) about how Vallée was mistaking hairdryer burns for messages from interdimensional tricksters. (Vallée does actually propose interdimensional tricksters as the cause of a variety of phenomena.)

 

But Wait, There’s More!

I then watched more of the hour-long video. A few minutes after declaring the marks a mystery, I was surprised to hear Vallée actually address the hairdryer hypothesis:

Look at the end of the hairdryer, it looks like [the mark] … So maybe she burned herself with her hairdryer. Well, if you try to do that, you’re going to get burned, alright. But it’s not going to look like this. Okay, you will have a burn. And so, so it’s not that. Although in some cases, the dimensions are pretty much the same as the ones on the grid in the front of your hairdryer. But it’s not always the same pattern.

So Vallée was in fact aware that the patterns match hairdryers but dismissed it with two objections: “It’s not going to look like this,” and “It’s not always the same pattern.”

I started to dig a little deeper and began to utilize my favorite tool: crowd-sourced research. Many hands (and eyes) make light work, especially when it comes to finding things. Vallée had said, “We’ve got cases from across the globe in every country.” But where are those cases? I started a thread on Metabunk.org and asked the internet (West 2022).

We found a few examples searching using English but hit gold after switching to French. We arrived at an old-fashioned discussion forum called “Touraine Insolite: Mystères & Etranges” (“Unusual Touraine: Mysteries & Strange Things”). Touraine is a province of France, and the site focuses locally on “the mysterious, UFOlogy and the paranormal” (Mikerynos 2013).

Somehow this site had become the worldwide hub for “Étranges traces circulaires cutanées” (“strange circular skin marks”). A single thread (and accompanying database) documented over 250 cases between 2013 and 2022. The cases were often illustrated with photos and accounts from the marked.

Hairdryer? Non!

The first cases did not mention hairdryers. But because it’s such an obvious explanation, it quickly emerged. Later cases joked about it or expressed suspicions of hairdryer involvement. Eventually we got to case sixty-nine, where they described waking up and finding the mark on their shoulder, and they could not imagine how they got it. But three days later, they decided “with certainty” that it was the hairdryer.

The site then amended the questionnaire, now asking 1) if they use a hairdryer, 2) what model it was, and 3) did they have a photo of it. While most people said they owned a hairdryer, very few people even answered the next two questions. But some did, and some realized their marks were from hairdryers.

Unfortunately, even there, the site administrator communicated with the person and attempted to convince them that this was unlikely, describing it as a “réaction sécurisante” (“reassuring reaction”)—i.e., a reaction that made the person feel good but was not correct. They pointed out the lack of remembered pain and other people having similar marks. Neither of which, as I later discovered, are valid objections.

Time for Experiments

The hairdryer hypothesis seemed very sound. The marks looked like the front grills of hairdryers, and some people had found such marks and determined that they were from hairdryers. Yet most of the cases either did not even consider it or they rejected it, saying they would have remembered such a painful burn.

Would they, though? Not willing to experiment full scale (and full pain) I hit upon a safer experiment. I used a rod-shaped thermocouple to measure the temperature at the grill by placing it just inside the hairdryer. I saw the temperature quickly rise to 75°C (167°F), where it stabilized. This did not seem that hot, so I grabbed the thermocouple and pressed the heated end into the skin of my arm.

There was a brief jolt of pain that vanished in a second, as you might get from touching food hot out of a microwave. The skin initially appeared unchanged, but after a few minutes a redness appeared in the shape of the thermocouple—a short line on my arm.

I watched the mark, photographing it every day. After two weeks it was still visible. It looked the same color as many of the marks seen in the database.

This showed that it is entirely possible to burn yourself with not much pain. Your skin would show no damage (if you even checked). The burn mark, painless, would show up a little later, by which time you may have dressed. Then you might not notice it for hours or even days. By that time, you could easily have forgotten such an inconsequential event, especially if there were a lot of other things going on.

Science and Hairdryers

What does it take to get such a burn? There’s actually a variety of factors that come into play other than temperature. The most significant is the thermal conductivity of your skin (basically how thick and dry it is). But the danger zone for first-degree (superficial) burns starts at around 70°C—about where my hairdryer (and thermocouple) were. So the small burn I got was probably representative of many actual hairdryer burns.

I studied the grills on the front of hairdryers. One of Vallée’s objections was that “It’s not always the same pattern.” But of course, there are quite a variety of different grills on the front of hairdryers. There are different numbers of circles and spokes, and they occur in a variety of combinations—so different patterns are expected.

In addition, I noticed that the grills are often slightly domed. The areas of skin where the marks were found were often rounded. A firm curved surface coming into contact with a soft curved surface might result in a variety of contact marks—either just the center, sometimes half the pattern, or sometimes just the edge. I used an ink pad to ink the grill on my hairdryer and quickly pressed it against my leg in a variety of ways. I got several marks, all from the same hairdryer, that looked very different.

 

If the Hairdryer Fits

The uniqueness of Vallée’s UFO case, as he presented it, hinged partly on the existence of this earlier mark on the person. Luckily, she had also submitted it to the database and answered the questionnaire. “Oui,” she said to the hairdryer usage question and “Silvercrest (Lidle)” to the question about the model. She did not have a photo of it, but it took little time to track down a typical Lidle Silvercrest and get an image of the front grill. I overlaid the photo of her mark, and it was a perfect match.

So she had what looked like a superficial burn (like my nearly pain-free burn) that seemed like it was a few days old and was an exact match for a partial skin contact with a hairdryer that matched the description of the one she owned. By far, the most reasonable explanation is that she simply did not remember burning herself. The mark is probably nothing special and unrelated to the later UFO case.

I emailed Vallée and Nolan, sharing my findings and seeking comments for this article. Vallée replied, saying he agreed with my interpretation about this particular case and had in fact done similar research in the past. Like me, he had found that many of the marks resembled hairdryer burns, and some were conclusively demonstrated to be from hairdryers. Nolan said they did this type of research at least eight years ago. This left the obvious questions of why Vallée was still using this mark as somehow relating to a UFO encounter in a 2020 presentation and why he seemed to casually dismiss the hairdryer hypothesis later in his talk.

Vallée said he had “removed certain cases from the dataset” but was reluctant to “expose” any individual case, as it “might discourage honest witnesses of more complex cases from coming forward.” He also expressed concern that the invalidation of the mark might cause the Skeptical Inquirer readership to use it as an excuse to dismiss the UFO photo. I pointed out that the witness remained anonymous, and the SI audience was unlikely to give a UFO photo much credence regardless.

The exchange reflects our differing philosophies and an issue with communication. I like to investigate individual cases and explain them if possible. Vallée also does this examination but prefers to keep the explanations private because it’s the big picture that’s important. Like many people in the UFO community, he sees the debunking of an individual case as resembling an attack on a broader argument. That is not my intent. Sometimes a hairdryer is just a hairdryer, but that does not mean we are not being visited by aliens. That’s a different discussion.

Note

1. All the images that accompany this article are simulated.

References

Mikerynos. 2013–2022. Étranges traces circulaires cutanées. Online at https://touraine-insolite.clicforum.fr/t987-tranges-traces-circulaires-cutan-es.htm.

Vallée, Jacques. 2020. Jacques Vallée Part 02: Recent close encounters (May 15). Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeSe0BDtPMA.

West, Mick, et al. 2022. The global cross-hair enigma that looks like hair dryer burns (August 3). Online at https://www.metabunk.org/threads/.12548/.