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A mysterious pink glow lit up the sky over the Australian city of Mildura on Wednesday evening, leaving residents wondering if they were witnessing an alien invasion, misplaced northern lights or some kind of solar flare.
Local resident Tammy Szumowski and her family thought the world might be coming to an end. “I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ It’s very strange, this huge pink light in the sky,” he said. “I’m trying not to freak out because I have my girls in the car.”
Others sought an explanation.
“I was driving home and it was dark, and I noticed a very unusual and quite large pink glow,” said Anne Webster, a lawmaker who represents the area in the Australian Parliament. “I thought that’s very strange. My first thought was that there must be a logical reason for this.”
The glow was actually emanating from a medical cannabis facility on the outskirts of Mildura that inadvertently revealed its previously undisclosed location while testing LED lights, which reflected off the cloudy night sky to create a scene strange and supernatural that scared and delighted the city of 56,000 inhabitants.
When the facility’s security guard investigated the source of the hot pink light, he noticed it was attracting attention around Mildura, which is about 340 kilometers northwest of Melbourne.
“He went out in the evening and he noticed a glow and he noticed some vehicles approaching to see where it was coming from,” Peter Crock, chief executive of the cannabis research and production company Cann Group, told The Australian that was behind the installation. Broadcasting Corp.
The company typically uses blackout curtains to hide the red-spectrum LED lights used to encourage plant growth. But on Wednesday the curtains were left open for a while, sending out a Bat-Signal that was visible for miles around the facility, located in the southeastern state of Victoria.
In 2016, Australia legalized the cultivation, research and manufacture of medical marijuana. Today, about 70,000 Australians turn to medical marijuana for relief, generating an estimated $160 million in revenue by 2021, according to cannabis market research firm Fresh Leaf Analytics. Australians use medical marijuana primarily for pain, anxiety and sleep problems, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology.
Prescriptions have increased in the past two years, which the study attributes in part to the “mental health burden” of Australia’s coronavirus containment restrictions. The country imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world before vaccinating 95 percent of its adult population.
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Cann Group was the first company licensed in Australia to conduct cannabis research. It received a $1.4 million grant from the Victorian state government, part of which was used to develop a commercial medical cannabis facility at an undisclosed location until ‘lighting incident this week. The Mildura facility, which was built on the site of a former juice factory, harvested its first batch earlier this month.
Mildura is known as a major producer of grapes, supplying wineries throughout the region. But his adventure in the production of cannabis is new.
“It’s providing jobs, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg because it has a great future for growth,” said Webster, the lawmaker, who has toured the Cann facility.
“We’ve resumed normal streaming, but it certainly got everyone’s attention in the meantime,” Crock, Cann’s chief executive, said of Wednesday’s incident. “Any publicity is good publicity.”