Hallucinations of little people in China and the Philippines linked to same object

Scientists have identified the wild mushrooms that have induced people to see hundreds of tiny, colourful humans moving around like regular people. This is the Lanmaoa asiatica, which has been found responsible for causing these hallucinations in China and the Philippines. According to a study by researchers at the University of Utah (U), even though the Lanmaoa asiatica mushroom has been linked to these visions, they found no evidence of known psychoactive mushroom compounds, including psilocybin.

The strange experience has been recorded in people living who ate wild mushroom thousands of kilometres apart. They are miniature humans walking, talking and even climbing around like others. These visions are known as Lilliputian hallucinations, and scientists believed that it could be linked to cultural beliefs and folklore.

However, researchers now say there is no biological explanation for what people living thousands of kilometres away from each other have been experiencing. The hallucinogenic substance in this case is believed to be completely new and unfamiliar. But it remains a mystery as scientists still need to identify this chemical.

The research was carried out by doctoral student Colin Domnauer and Bryn Dentinger, a mycologist, who said that the discovery could have implications that stretch beyond the study of fungi. The findings were published in the journal Mycologia.

In 1934, some people in Papua New Guinea reported having vivid visions of tiny humans after eating wild mushrooms. Anthropologists and mushroom specialists identified several possible species from the Boletaceae (bolete) family that could have been the cause. But chemical testing did not reveal any substances that could explain the hallucinations. Since no scientific explanation was found, scientists started believing that they could be arising from cultural expectations or traditional beliefs.

In the 1990s, people in Yunnan, Southwest China, reported similar hallucinations. There, they suspected a mushroom species known as Lanmaoa asiatica. In 2024, an Indigenous community in the remote Northern Cordillera region of the Philippines reported the same experiences. Community members said that a wild edible mushroom called "Sedesdem" led them to see miniature people.

Same mushroom, different names

Investigations in Yunnan and the Philippines revealed that the wild mushrooms - Jian shou qing in China and Sedesdem in the Philippines - that induced the hallucinations were both L. asiatica. This went against their theory that the wild mushroom species was only present in China.

Surprisingly, chemical testing and genetic analysis did not show the presence of any established psychoactive compounds found in other mushroom species. They now think L. asiatica produces an unidentified psychoactive substance that causes the tiny human hallucinations. They hope that discovering this compound could open an entirely new avenue of research into how certain chemicals alter visual perception.