Bigfoot sightings reported in the US

Indian IT services exports have grown in tight formation with American Bigfoot sightings, which is the kind of correlation that should make a software engineer in Bangalore double-check the woods on the way home. The forests, for the record, are still American. The code, increasingly, is not.

Both numbers climbed steadily through the 2000s and 2010s for entirely unrelated reasons. Indian IT exports grew as offshoring scaled and the country's tech industry matured, while US Bigfoot sighting reports rose with the spread of cameras, smartphones, and reporting websites that lowered the cost of submitting an account. One curve is global outsourcing; the other is the democratization of cryptid journalism.

So the correlation is two parallel growth stories from very different forests. The code shipped. The footprints did not. Both got more reports.