Mystery Kangaroos Again

Yes, Austrian, not Australian, kangaroos are in the news. According to an Associated Press report, one was seen leaping down a Tyrol province highway during October 2006. But on October 11, law enforcement officials explained to the public this was an alleged September escapee from an enclosure in the village of Volders.

At least, that is the police statement. The uncaught kangaroo is still at large.

Reportedly, in March, 2006, a kangaroo was encountered in southern Austria. A local veterinarian using a stun gun captured it. Then a Tyrol wild animal breeder came forth, saying it was his. Humm.

These mystery, supposedly escapee, kangaroo sightings, as for example in Minnesota last year, are more frequent than most people think.

Sometimes real kangaroos are taken. A fifty pound kangaroo (actually a dama wallaby, Macropus eugenii, an extremely common captive exotic pet) was killed in rural Mauston, Wisconsin, on December 7, 2005, by a truck driven by Ralph Hamm (seen at the top of this post). It had jumped out in front of Hamm’s truck in his driveway, but he could not stop.

The Wisconsin State Journal noted that “kangaroos hopping around southern Wisconsin are becoming an annual occurrence. During last winter [2004-2005], a 130-pound kangaroo eluded Iowa County authorities for two days until he was finally corralled in a horsebarn on a farm south of Dodgeville.”

The locals and the paper soberly concluded: “Where the wayward marsupials are coming from is a mystery. “

Despite a lack of local sightings, Hamm said he backtracked and found that the kangaroo had apparently been living under a culvert on his property. The culvert area had a lot of prints and a line where the kangaroo dragged his tail.

Hamm is thinking about making a taxidermy mount of his kangaroo, while the Dodgeville kangaroo, nicknamed “Roo,” is a live attraction at the Vilas Zoo in Madison.

Reports of cryptid kangaroos in Wisconsin, especially during the classic flap of 1978, are chronicled, in depth, in Mysterious America.

As far as the “name game” (see Mysterious America, Chapter 22, “The Name Game,”) goes, Hamm is a name I’ve run across before. One specific strange sighting took place on September 19, 1970, near Pana, Illinois, to firefighter A. V. Hamm, who told me a gray tannish pumalike animal appeared to fall out of the sky or leap gracefully over a bunch of bushes near the path of his car.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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