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Waitress Marilyn Hollenback reportedly laughed for 20 minutes when a customer in the dinner announced that he had just hit a kangaroo with the pickup truck. Tulsa, Oklahoma, was an unlikely place to meet a kangaroo running wild.

Two Tulsa police officers also listened to the man’s story. He had seen two of the creatures, he said, and on swerving to avoid one he had hit the other. The dead kangaroo was in his truck. Hollenback and the officers went to look, and there lay a three-and-a-half-foot-long kangaroo. Having satisfied his skeptical audience, the man climbed back into his truck and drove away.

On the Hop

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The incident took place on August 31, 1981. Later, patrolman Ed Compos commented ruefully that he wished he had taken a picture of the animal. This was by no means the only occasion that someone had seen a wild kangaroo in the United States, but it was the only time that anyone had actually managed to catch one.

Weighing as much as 220 pounds and measuring up to five feet in height, kangaroos can reach speeds of 25 miles per hour in bounds that cover more than 30 feet at a time. But wild kangaroos are believed to live only in Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and a few other islands.

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However, sighting of kangaroos in the United States date back to at least 1899 and have been reported, mainly in the Midwest, on regular basis ever since. On the first occasion, a Mrs. Glover in Richmond, Wisconsin, saw a kangaroo racing through a neighbor’s yard. At the time, both a traveling circus and a tornado were visiting Richmond, and everyone assumed that the anomalous marsupial had escaped in the confusion of the storm. But Robert H. Gollmar, the son of the circus owner, denied that the show owned a kangaroo.

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Another outbreak of wild kangaroo in Wisconsin took place between April 5 and May 21, 1978, this time in Waukesha County. Eight sightings were reported. On April 23 tracks were found after Lance Nero of Brookfield Township saw two kangaroos hopping cross country neat his house. The next day two young men from Menomonee Falls managed to photograph a kangaroo that they had spotted by the side of the highway. And in the last week of May two additional sightings were reported in Wisconsin.

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Probably the most dramatic encounter with kangaroos in the United States occurred in 1974 in Illinois. On October 18 two Chicago patrolmen cornered a five-foot specimen in an alley on the city’s North Side.

Fearful and panicked, the kangaroo growled defensively and used its powerful legs to kick the policemen aside. A split second later the creature leaped over a fence and disappeared from view.

One Jump Ahead

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Later at that the day another sighting of a kangaroo was reported in the nearby suburb of Oak Park. Over the next five days kangaroos were seen in Chicago at least five more times. The following month the creatures reappeared in Chicago and were reported simultaneously in Plano, Illinois, 50 miles to the west. Then reports stopped, the animals had disappeared as mysteriously as they had arrived.

Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain the bizarre phenomenon, but to date no satisfactory answers have been found. Some commentators suggest that kangaroos in the United States are the shy descendants of animals that, on some unknown occasion in the past, escaped from a circus or zoo. One rational explanation is that they are native marsupials not yet officially discovered or classified; however, the only evolutionary ancestors come from South, not North, America.

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Not surprisingly, some people believe that the mystery animals of North America are paranormal manifestations of some kind. But that might be jumping to conclusions.