The Waukesha County Phantom Kangaroos and the Pewaukee Polaroid

Kangaroos do not belong in Wisconsin. Yet for more than two weeks in April 1978, people across Waukesha County kept reporting them. The case joined a strange American tradition of phantom kangaroo sightings, including a 1974 police chase in a Chicago alley.

In early April, Waukesha school bus driver Patricia Wilcox reported two kangaroos. "I thought they were deer at first," she said. "People were honking and slamming on their brakes, and finally, one guy hit one." The animal reportedly got away. She told the Waukesha Freeman: "I'm sane, sober and I saw kangaroos."

Within a week, a report came from Pewaukee. The Freeman went on to report 12 more sightings within a month. A family in the Town of Pewaukee saw it in their backyard. A Muskego couple caught it in their headlights in the early morning hours. A Town of Brookfield man saw it in his yard while eating breakfast on a Sunday morning.

April 23, 1978. Lance Nero was at his home near Waukesha. Two supposed kangaroos came hopping out of the adjacent woods. They left well-formed, three-pronged tracks. Casts were later made.

The next day, two anonymous men with a loaded camera, reportedly a Polaroid SX-70, spotted the creature close to two highways near Waukesha. One account puts them in tall grass near Highways SS and M. The first picture was too blurred for identification; the second was dark and indistinct, but showed a bipedal animal reminiscent of a macropod. Loren Coleman, who now owns it, described a tan animal with lighter brown front limbs and dark patches around the eyes and inside the two upright ears. Coleman compared it to a Bennett's wallaby.

The Waukesha County Sheriff's Department kept its distance. "We respond and talk to the people, but there is no, quote, investigation," Lt. Gary Paluszcyk told The Milwaukee Journal. Deputies identified the Nero tracks as deer prints. On April 27, the Wisconsin Agriculture Department issued a press release warning residents about possible kangaroos and disease risks. A local tavern organised a kangaroo hunt that found nothing.

In 1978, brothers Richard and Jack Schmitt and their friend Craig Rittershaus told the Freeman they had staged a prank. "I made a kangaroo cutout in my garage from plywood," Richard said. They smeared mud on it and used toothpaste for the eye. In 2000, Randy Latta told Journal Sentinel columnist Laurel Walker that he, his older brother Rick and two friends attached handles to a homemade plywood kangaroo, hid in bushes in their Brookfield neighbourhood, and hopped it across the road when cars came by. An unconfirmed story holds that the photographers were taxidermists with a stuffed wallaby.

Janet Napientek had reported a sighting 12 days after Wilcox. She did not back down. "I know what I saw, and I know it was a kangaroo," she said. "What those kids were doing was a separate issue. We have a small farm and I know animals."

The cutouts may explain glimpses from passing cars. They do not obviously explain the tracks, the animal struck by a car, or the backyard sightings. Coleman put the case into his book Mysterious America, and Karl Shuker revisited it decades later. Nobody has reconciled every confession with every report.