US craft beer productionFireball meteor sightings reported
American craft brewing and the number of fireball sightings reported in any given year, both rising. Somewhere a man is on his porch with an IPA, looks up, sees the bright streak, and contributes to both datasets in the same evening. The universe rewards multitasking.
US craft beer production roughly tripled from 2005 to its 2019 peak, then plateaued, as the number of breweries expanded from under fifteen hundred to over nine thousand. Fireball reports tracked along the same curve, but the cause is observational: the American Meteor Society's web reporting form, smartphones, and dashcams turned bystanders into witnesses. The actual rate of fireballs entering Earth's atmosphere did not change; the rate of someone seeing one and writing it down did. The night sky stayed steady; the people watching it kept multiplying.
Most apparent meteors are reporting infrastructure. The sky is the boring constant. We are the variable.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “US craft beer production” vs “Fireball meteor sightings reported” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
