Have you been synchronizing Scrivener with an external folder or anything like that? As asotir said, this is what you would see if you opened an RTF file in a plain text editor. Which suggests that, somewhere along the line, the file extension might have been changed from RTF to TXT.
If looking through your backup files doesn’t help, you might also try this:
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Use the File -> Backup -> Backup Now command to make a backup of your Scrivener project, in case something goes wrong.
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With Scrivener closed, find the project in Finder. Right-click, and select the option to Show Package Contents.
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Look in the Files/Docs subfolder. You’ll see a long list of files with names like “123.rtf.”
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Sort by Kind, and scroll down to see all files with the .txt extension.
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Using QuickLook, look to see if one of these is your problem file. If you find it, drag it out of the project to a location like your Desktop, rename it with the .RTF extension, and try opening it in TextEdit.
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If that restores it to “normal,” then you can re-import it back into the Scrivener project. If not, then the RTF formatting is probably damaged.
Katherine