Where there’s no smoke, there’s fire?
Drivers have been racking their brains after finding mysterious burn marks in their cars despite the fact that they don’t smoke cigarettes.
These burning questions came to light via an Instagram video catching fire online.
“This person says they stayed at a hotel at the beach and the next morning that mark was there on their visor,” said content creator and humorist Jason K Pargin in the clip.
He pointed to a screenshot of the Reddit post in question, which shows a scorch streak traversing the sunshade as if someone sliced across it with a laser.
Other examples included a long black burn mark that ran across the entire headlining of the car and another that melted through the visor like the acid blood from the “Alien” movies.
Even more common, per the clip, were what looked like cigarette burns in the interior of these hot rods.
These are apparently so common that many people are “falsely accused of smoking in the car because they returned it with a burn mark like that,” per Pargin.
“There’s a kid saying his parents accused him of smoking” because of a burn mark in the seat, exclaimed the Instagrammer, who was the former Executive Editor for Cracked.com.
What was the cause of these charred cars?
Leaving a reflective surface in your car on a sunny day, per the clip.
Pargin explained that an H20 container left in a vehicle is the perfect tool for focusing sunlight “just like a magnifying glass,” melting and burning the interior of people’s whips with the beam.
These firewater fiascos are so prevalent that fire departments “do demonstrations” on this phenomenon, showing that you can set a piece of paper alight with nothing more than a “bottle of water, the sun and a few minutes.”
However, not all of these marks are caused by hydration vessels.
As Pargin pointed out, the long, ceiling-scorching burn marks were the result of leaving a makeup mirror in the passenger seat.
“Any sufficiently reflective surface” will produce this destructive beam, said the social media star, adding that the moral is that it’s “very easy to build a death ray.”
Redditors were quick to relay their own tales of how a seemingly innocuous object nearly sparked a deadly fire.
“My mom did it with a CD,” recalled one.
“The sun came in at a low angle, was focused by a magnifying lamp over a desk, and burned up a file box,” said another. “The smoke alarm kept the house from burning down, but it’s a good thing someone was home to notice and put it out.”
A third wrote, “We had a small decorative glass ball with air bubbles in it. When dusting I found a dime sized scorch mark behind it.”
In perhaps the craziest example, which was referenced in the video, a house in Wisconsin nearly burned down in 2021 due to a crystal ball that was left in direct sunlight.
As commenters pointed out, this incident is why magic shops keep these so-called divination tools covered in cloth.
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