While I have limited knowledge of the science behind it and others have explained it better than I could anyway, I can tell you with 100% certainty that it's true at least in regards to the smell/visuals and that the effect is very pronounced due to having unwillingly and excessively observed mosquito behavior during military service in a mosquito ridden area in the north of sweden (arctic ranger). Of course behavior might vary between different types of mosquitoes.

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It's almost the perfect empirical experiment for your question; dozens of men line up, and stand still so that the mosquitoes can freely choose their victim (the first day or days no one told us to use insect repellant but everyone quickly learnt after that - after using repellant the effect was similar, they just didn't settle to bite much).

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The result was that one guy might have a few mosquitoes, the next none, the next dozens, then one would have hundreds or thousands, pattern repeated until the end of the line.

As a rough estimate, perhaps one person in 10 or so would be super attractive and have the vast majority of mosquitoes around them, and the rest 0-50 each.

Some people, myself included, simply seemed so incredibly attractive to mosquitoes to the point of creating little clouds of them.

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Another observation I made is that when bathing in cold water, like a mountain lake, the mosquitoes and all the other resident stinging and biting insects like horseflies etc did not notice you and did not bite for about a minute. I assumed this was due to cold skin (so less IR, or less visible blood vessels, or less smell, or some combination).

If you get dressed really quick and quickly apply insect repellant you can completely avoid getting bitten.

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There is also an old folk-saying that those the mosquitoes like, the ticks don't, and vice versa. Anecdotally for me, it has held true, as the mosquitoes truly love me but I have never had a tick despite being very active in areas in nature where others frequently get ticks.

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Fun fact: our platoon record for killing mosquitoes in a single open hand strike was 63.