New American Kangaroo Sightings

Hi, and welcome to Crash Course Cryptozoology. Today I would like to discuss a particular topic in cryptozoology that has not received much attention in more recent years, but however, seems to persist nonetheless. In fact, the significant takeaway from this subject is its relatively hidden persistence. That is to say, I would like to discuss sightings both past and present of the American kangaroo. Recently on the Crash Course Cryptozoology Facebook page, I linked an article about American kangaroo sightings in an attempt to simply fulfill the page's duty of informing people about cryptozoology as a subject for the day. It became more than that, however, when two people, people who are in my social circles at that, came out with kangaroo sightings of their own. I was lucky enough to get permission from both of them to allow them to publicly narrate their stories, thus putting them on record for the very first time. Before we get into those interviews, and to slow down to a more comprehensive pace for a bit, it's proper that we first gain an understanding of what exactly is meant by American kangaroo. To clarify, American kangaroo is not a title that refers to some kind of offshoot species that used to exist or anything of that sort. American kangaroo simply refers to the strange phenomenon of witnesses seeing kangaroos in North America. Kangaroos, of course, are marsupials that are confined only to the continent of Australia. As far as is known, aside from acclimation by zoos, there is no mainstream non-black market kangaroo trade. The question, of course, for many of these witnesses is, what is a kangaroo doing in North America? Over the timeline of sightings, which many sources say lasts about 200 years in the documentation, there have been many proposed theories as to what it is people could be seeing. Escaped exotic pets and missing zoo animals ranking among some of them. There are, however, certain sightings that would suggest something different might be going on. Although sources claim that kangaroo sightings go back as far as the late 1800s, the most well-documented ones are those that take place in the mid to late 20th century. Particularly, a sighting stream from the 1970s documents that a Chicago police group actually followed a kangaroo for a certain amount of time before losing the animal, and that subsequent sightings were reported in both Illinois and Indiana. Some have even posited that American kangaroo sightings might be responsible for some of the more anomalous or 4T encrypted North America is familiar with, such as the Jersey Not all of the American kangaroo subject, however, is so cryptic and vague. There is, under the surface, some very compelling evidence, such as a piece of footage from 2013 shot by a group of hunters in Oklahoma that, without doubt, shows a kangaroo. I would like to posit that alongside things like this piece of footage, we should consider recent eyewitness testimony as something significant to this subject. This is not an old myth that has since dropped off. Sightings seem to be still continuing, and if the formerly undocumented nature of these two reports is anything to go off of, there may be more sightings than we would assume. I will now share the interviews with the two newer witnesses, who are Eli Watson, the host of the cryptozoology podcast Cryptid Campfire, and Jeremy Sanborn, a diver who I have worked with on the documentary Release the Bodette film. I was around eight or nine years old, and we were meeting, if I recall correctly, at the zoo. It was around dusk, and so we were driving in a suburban at the time. I was sitting in the middle row, directly behind my mom, who was in the passenger seat on the right side, and I was looking out the window, and just towards this hill that was on our right side, you know, there's bushes here and there, and I felt like I was staring at this one bush, and I couldn't make out what made this bush different, because it looks, you know, to me, like all the other bushes, and then it just kind of sprung up and started hopping away in the same direction as our car, I think I should add, and so I was able to observe it for, let's say, five seconds before we eventually sped past it, but I was like, whoa, that's a kangaroo, thinking in my head, and my mom echoed that statement out loud. She was like, oh shit, it's a kangaroo, and, you know, if I had to guesstimate how far away it was, I would probably say, you know, about 100 yards. It wasn't very close, it wasn't very large either, you know, I'm not exactly an expert on how large kangaroos are, but it didn't look too much bigger than the bushes that were around. It was definitely significant enough for it to stand out to us, but it also did really blend in with the kind of the other bushes. It's like a tannish gray, it's kind of like this dead bush color, I guess, to describe it. Right. Now, the whole setting being just five seconds long, was there any other details that you could see on it, or was it just kind of this quick incident altogether? It was just a quick incident. I mean, I thought I saw a tail. The legs were what stood out to me a lot. As far as the head goes, I don't really remember seeing much of the head. I just remember seeing it hopping, you know, which is why I thought it was a kangaroo. I think that's why my mom thought it was a kangaroo. But yeah, I don't know, it was definitely strange and interesting. And this was far away from the zoo, you mentioned, right? Yeah, I think this is about, you know, 30 or 40 miles away from the zoo. Yeah, not a place you'd expect to see the kangaroo. Yeah, yeah, definitely not a place you can see kangaroo. I don't think Southern California, San Diego is home to kangaroos. It's pretty much not, from what we know. Yeah, exactly. That was the conclusion of Eli Watson's interview. I will now play the audio from Jeremy Sanborn's interview. So, I was coming home, watching the street climbers there. And like, there's not a lot of eerie woods. I mean, they're walking a couple roads, you know, that you can come out to some woods. But there's nothing like really, like, so I'm pulling in, and there's a double garage kind of down the back. And I see my headlights on the left side. Also, I see the sheep, and it was just there, and then gone, and weird, like, I don't know, like, did something jump. But the first thing that came to my mind, I don't know why, was freaking kangaroo. It's just how its posture was, and stuff. I don't know, it's just, that's what came to mind. Right. It was crazy, it was gray. And it wasn't like a wicked dark gray, but it was gray, like you say, regular gray color. And I'd say probably like, I don't know, five, five feet, maybe. It was kind of tall, or just an animal in the yard, you know. That's what I thought it might have been. A person. It wasn't really two persons, you know, it just went, it disappeared, like, in a second. But it was just there, and then gone. So, I don't know what it was, but it was strange. And like I said, the first thing I thought it was a freaking kangaroo, because I went, got out of the car, I looked around, didn't see anything, and I went into the house, and I asked my girlfriend out of the car, I'm like, did you hear about any kangaroos escaping from somewhere? Because I swear I just saw one out in the yard. And she remembered, too, I thought it was the other day. And I don't know, man, it was weird. Yeah, it sounds weird. Yeah, I mean, I would have, you know, at first you would think, like, all right, a person. But, you know, in the, like, for actually the second I did see it, I thought, you know, there's not one in my yard. But then, just how it moved, and the way it looked, it just all of a sudden, like, kangaroo just came into mind. So, I don't know. Yeah, it was strange. I mean, it was, I don't know if it was a person all dressed in gray, and they jumped, you know, and they were kind of thick, too. It wasn't, like, anything small. It was, like, a decent-sized figure. And so, yeah. But then, as I was with one of my buddies, like, a few years ago, he's talking to me. There you go. He's leading up, you know, the story. He says he's driving, and all of a sudden, this thing jumped in the road. And I'm like, did you see a kangaroo? He said, yeah, dude, I swear it was a kangaroo. It jumped across the highway, the road. It jumped over, yeah, a barrier. And he said it was a kangaroo. And I'm like, I thought I saw a kangaroo. It is certainly noteworthy that both of these witnesses are people who have people in their lives that were either at or afterwards were able to corroborate the sighting in some degree. What exactly this means cannot be said for sure yet. These are not individuals who are prone to making up sightings. I see no reason to come to the conclusion that they would be dishonest about this, both of them being relatively humble in their telling of the story as much as was necessary. The subject of American or phantom kangaroos is a very strange one, not only by the fact that kangaroos themselves are rather strange animals, but by the fact that of all places to see one, North America is certainly one of the strangest. And I would love to know what all of you think of these phantom kangaroo sightings, or perhaps if any of you have your own stories to share. That being said, until next time.