> Hence their destructive effect is likely to be qualitatively different from that of a bullet; a macro impact typically heats the cylinder of tissue carved out along its path to a temperature of 10^7 K[18, 19], resulting in an expanding cylinder of plasma inside the body. While some studies have been done on collisions of hypersonic, micron-sized projectiles with fixed targets[23], these differed significantly from macro collisions in that the experimental projectiles were of much lower density, and the targets were “hard” rather than “soft”. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to take the kinetic energy deposited by a macro as a threshold for significant damage to the human body. Energy con- servation requires that the macro energy ultimately be deposited in the body in some form, whether mechanical or thermal, which will result in an equivalent amount of damage.

Victims would look they’d been shot with a laser bullet out of sci-fi. As is mentioned in the article, they found no evidence of bullet wounds that also featured vaporization of tissue.

> These deaths would not go unnoticed—they would leave victims dead or dying with a tubular wound where their flesh was vaporized.

People would wonder if a government agency wasn't using some sort of drone or satellite weapon to eliminate targets.

The dark matter particle they searched for would, if it exists, would enter the body undetected and interact inside the body, producing the gunshot-like damage inside the body, and I guess likely an exit wound, without any entry wound.

That's basically how the current dark matter searches work that I know of, albeit with different media than a human body.

This isn’t a rhetorical question by the way, I genuinely do not know if the mere absence of a bullet at the deep end would be sufficient, or if entrance and exit wounds look so radically different from each other that no one could possibly mistake one for the other.

I'm pretty sure it's "easy" to tell an entrance from an exit, especially with a hollow point bullet (basically like an explosion out of the exit). Even without the explosion thing, I'd be shocked to learn that there are not tell-tale signs because an object pushing inward at a high speed will leave the tissue at certain angles, like maybe the soft tissue caved a little inward around the entrance, the bones broken in the direction the bullet was traveling, that sort of thing.

But all those thing depend on the object being ballistic, like a fast moving object flying through the body. With a "laser beam" sort of wound, I'm not sure any of that would apply.

I assume that looking at a wound caused by a laser would be pretty baffling -- a roughly cylindrical, cauterized void with no apparent directionality. Even if the cause wasn't clear, I think it would look weird enough for a professional to say "Wait, something is super weird here."

[The book is "Unnatural Causes" by Dr Richard Shepherd - strongly recommended even if it is just a wee bit gruesome in places.]

Massive amounts of research was done to prevent bullets from doing exactly that.

If this was a thing, it would presumably be constant throughout history, even before guns were invented. Heck, you'd see it as cause of death in fossilized dinosaurs.