Yes — the eye can see moiré when two regular patterns in the scene overlap, such as grilles, fabric weave, and shadows. In that case, what you saw was genuine moiré.

What’s different in digital photography is that moiré can also appear when a single fine repeating subject pattern interacts with the camera sensor’s pixel grid. There, the second pattern is created by the sensor sampling the scene.

With human vision, you generally don’t get that same sensor-grid moiré from looking at just one fine pattern, because the eye doesn’t work like a regular pixel grid. Any sampling/aliasing effects in vision are not typically perceived as the clean moiré patterns seen from cameras.

So:

• two visible scene patterns overlapping: both humans and cameras can show moiré
• one fine scene pattern interacting with a digital sensor: mainly a camera artifact