The Chicago Phantom Kangaroo: Patrolmen Byrne and Ciagi's Alley Encounter

Friday, 18 October 1974. The early morning hours. On Chicago's Northwest Side, a resident called police. A kangaroo, he reported, was standing on his porch.

Patrolmen Michael Byrne and Leonard Ciagi went to look. They found it. In a dark alley in the Jefferson Park district, they cornered an animal about five feet tall. The Vidette described it as gray, between four and six feet tall, and carrying a pouch. Later accounts say it was growling in a "most disconcerting manner."

The officers tried to restrain it. The animal fought back. Accounts that trace back to Loren Coleman say Ciagi tried to handcuff it and was kicked in the legs.

The Vidette reported that it "gave a solid kangaroo punch to Patrolman Michael Byrne's shin when Byrne and another officer wrestled with it Friday." The Chicago Tribune said an officer who tried to handcuff it was "thoroughly kicked." More squad cars arrived. Then, in one telling, "the kangaroo took off at high speed, cleared a fence and vanished from the scene."

The next day, a paperboy saw a kangaroo. On 23 October, one was reported in the Schiller Woods area. According to the Vidette, Chicago police spent five days trying to capture it.

On 1 November, a police officer near Plano, Illinois, said the animal "jumped eight feet from a field into the road." About 30 minutes later, a kangaroo was reported back in Chicago. Roughly 50 miles away.

More reports came over the following three days from the surrounding countryside. On 6 November, a sighting near Lansing, Illinois. A few days later, a rash of sightings in Indiana. Then, approximately one month after the alley encounter, the reports stopped.

On 24 October, six days after the alley encounter, President Gerald Ford spoke at the United Republican Fund Dinner in Chicago. He joked that a kangaroo had been "dodging tacklers" in the city. The police wanted to put it in the zoo. The Bears wanted to put it in the backfield.

No animal was ever caught. No zoo, circus, exotic animal dealer or private owner reported a kangaroo missing. The short gap between Plano and Chicago led writers to suggest more than one animal, or that some reports were mistaken. Strand Magazine says that in the end, "most came to think of the whole story as a newspaper hoax." Yet it also reports that the officer involved "insisted that it was real, and that they had a good idea where it came from, but that the chief, embarrassed by the ordeal, ordered him to tell the press it was all a joke."

Loren Coleman, writing with Fideler in Fate in April 1978 and later in Mysterious America, made the Chicago animal a standard entry in American out-of-place animal writing. Jerome Clark included it in Unexplained! Karl Shuker revisited it. It heads a long list of Illinois phantom kangaroo reports, from Evanston to Rock Island. Four years later came the Wisconsin wave around Waukesha, where three men eventually admitted to a plywood cutout. The Chicago kangaroo was never found.