I read this post and I simutaneously thought, "Wow, that is so weird!" and also "This is very familiar". Then it came to me -- it was on This American Life -- https://www.thisamericanlife.org/840/transcript
I listen to podcasts. I don't watch videos.
1 - Yes, I knew that I'd heard it semi-recently too. Nice link find!
That's actually a different person with it in 1! interesting.
Or, as we like to call it, They Live Syndrome.
That was a good movie. Back when you could have a political villain be a little subtle and it wouldn't seem unrealistic.
There's a nifty illusion somebody created that is probably related to this, where you fixate on a central point and rapidly cycling faces distort and get monstrous; I don't think Brad Duchaine or anybody knows the etiology of these delusions but it is likely to be related to something going haywire in our internal face representation such that faces get "pulled" in the representational space farther away from the average face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXWhvcuv3Zk
oh, there's also a celebrity version, which can give you a sense of how you could have this effect but still recognize who people are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT9i99D_9gI
Possibly irrelevantnÃ, but Serge Gainsbourg recorded a reggae album with Robbie Shakespeare in 1979, it's pretty good