It's really hard to tell without pictures, so once those are uploaded it should make it a lot easier to tell. I'm not super knowledgeable with ball pythons but from the description it almost sounds like stuck shed. Is it similar to stuck shed that it is a covering of the scale or is it the scale itself? If it's the scales themself coming off I wouldguess that it's from a burn because that's the only time I've ever heard of scales peeling off. Do you know the temperature of the hottest part of the enclosure, with a heat gun measuring the surface instead of measuring the ambient temperature?