My friends and I used to make jokes about reptilian theories.
Politicians blinking strangely, celebrities moving weirdly, blurry videos, all of it. We treated it like internet comedy.
Then one night, someone sent me a video from a private event.
It was not famous. No celebrity. No politician. Just a man giving a speech at a business conference.
For a few seconds, his face looked wrong.
Not like a filter. Not like bad lighting. His eyes seemed to reflect light in a way that did not match the room. The skin near his jaw looked like it moved separately from the rest of his face.
I know cameras glitch. I know compression creates strange artifacts. I know the human brain sees patterns where there are none.
But I watched that clip maybe fifty times.
The next day, the video was deleted from the group chat.
Nobody admitted deleting it.
Since then, I do not say I believe in reptilians.
But I also do not laugh as quickly as I used to.