For 59-year-old Victor Sharrah, the terrible symptoms began one winter evening in Nashville, Tennessee. “As soon as I woke up, I sat on the couch and started watching TV. When my friend entered the room I was horrified by what I saw. Then his girlfriend came in and her face looked just as scary to me,” Sharrah told CNN.

The faces that had been friendly to him until that day seemed distorted, with elongated eyes and fearful markings. If he saw them in profile, their ears looked pointed. “I tried to explain to them, but they thought I was crazy,” says Sharrah. “Then I went outside and everyone’s faces looked like that.”

What Sharrah would later learn was that he hadn’t suddenly started seeing patterns, but had a rare health problem called “prosopometamorphosis”, which caused him to see people’s faces in a distorted form. But strangely the objects and other parts of the human body seemed unchanged to him.

“I helped create a two-dimensional picture to explain to others so they could understand exactly what I see. But what I see is a moving face, not a picture.

According to medical records all over the world, other people who suffer from this vision distortion, people’s faces appear like dragons or fish heads, in some cases the eyes seem to pop out of place.

“The woman who saw dragons started seeing them as a child, so we still have a lot to learn about this deformity,” says Brad Duchaine, professor of psychological and neurological sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Only 81 such cases are known in the world, but there are probably many others that have not been made public, says Duchaine, author of the study on this phenomenon, published in the magazine “Lancet”.

Because there is little information about the condition, people who suffer from it are often diagnosed with schizophrenia or as having hallucinations and given the wrong therapies, experts say. In addition, people who have this deformity in vision may later develop brain tumors or various infections.