[UPDATE: Turns out this is of a 1997 Promise Keepers’ rally. The Czar was right to note the missing metadata. Apologies.]

If we treat the USA Today chart as authoritative, this shows well in excess of LBJ’s 1.2 million people. Doing a quick-and-dirty estimate of the amount of ground the crowds around the Washington Monument are occupying gives another couple hundred thousand, putting the total around 1.5 million.

But, thus spake the Czar:

We, by the grace of God, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Tauric Chersonesos, Tsar of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, and Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, took that photograph and put it on our left, jewel-encrusted Fabergé monitor.

We went to Google maps and went to map view to zoom into the exact area of the mall shown in the picture. We then switched to satellite view, and took a screen capture of it.

We opened up AutoCAD on our right-hand monitor. We pasted in the satellite image. Using a polyline tool, we traced over the areas that people are standing in, including the crowds that spilled over onto the streets, around the curved pavilion behind the Castle, and even drew around the trees because no one was in the thickets. We came up with four distinct crowds: two at the Washington Monument, one between the Monument and the Mall (a small one), and of course the Mall all the way up to the Reflecting Pool.

We deleted the photo, leaving the polylines. Knowing from the photo that 7/8″ actual was equivalent to 500 feet, we scaled up the polylines to full size. AutoCAD computes areas of enclosed polylines, and the grand total of all four crowd shapes was 2,350,069 square feet.

Now. Here’s what happens. If you use the usual method of computing massed crowds (the one the journalists use), you divide the square footage by two… and you get 1,175,035. That’s where the 1.2 million number comes from.

But to be honest, that “divide by 2” trick is only used in extremely packed conditions…like how many guys can you stuff into a locker. A more reasonable number for a loose crowd—like at a concert in the park—is 4.5 sq. ft. per person. If that’s a better description for what you see in the photo, then there are only about 522,238 people in that photo. We don’t think this crowd is tightly packed, especially if it was walking and converging. We would say the crowd is tighter closest to the Capitol, and fading back to about 9 square feet per person. We boldly suggest there are between 600,000-750,000 people in this picture!*

We noticed that USA Today is dividing by 2.5 sq. ft./person We think that’s outrageously tight. That’s like sardines! We have ordered the execution of their statician. Using that figure, we trace an even larger area than they did, and we still wind up with 940,028 people. So not only do we conclude 2.5 sq. ft./person is wrong, we think they’re wrong in their computation of the Mall’s area!

THUS SPEAKS THE CZAR! HEAR AND TREMBLE!

*Caveat: the photo is cropped to the West, and more importantly, the Czar cannot see around buildings to know precisely how big the spillover is. (We have received no reports from the Okhrana on this point. The responsible parties have been shot.) Further, we do NOT know if that was the crowd at its height. Frankly, who knows what that photo was from? Unfortunately, the photo was run through Photoshop or something first, because the camera information and creation data is missing from the file. If it had been the original photo from the camera, we’d be able to determine the exact moment in time the picture was taken to know if that was really the full extent of the crowd.

We do not think the picture was edited to increase numbers: The Czar sees a little repetition of colors—usually the sign of doctoring by cloning one part of the picture to another—but those are small blotches in the center of the mall. That’s the least likely place to doctor a picture…usually you do that at the fringes or sides to increase the crowds furthest from the center. Conclusion: real photo. The shadow lengths suggest afternoon, as the Washington Monument shadow is long but pointing from the southwest. If it were evening, the shadow would point East, and if earlier, the shadow of the Monument would be much shorter. So we suspect the photo is legit, and from the later afternoon.

Still, even at our worst case of 522,000 souls, that’s way bigger than what was reported. And like the Czar said, this photo does not cover everything going on.

Ergo, your unofficial Gormogons’ crowd estimate is, oh, let’s say 750,000 or so. (Incidentally, recalculating the Volgi’s 1.8M above with the Czar‘s 4.5 sq.ft./person density gives a hair above an even million people in the video.) But, given the math of previous crowd estimates, our 750,000 people probably outnumber those at some events put at a million or more.

Just to show you how much of a shot in a dark all these crowd estimates are: the “official” figure of 1.8M for Barack Obama’s inauguration is, upon examination, quite sketchy. The Park Service (probably having MMM flashbacks [or MMMM, as ’Puter would say]) chose not to produce a number after “1.8M” got out there and simply adopted it as a record. Meanwhile, an Arizona State University professor looked at a satellite image and came up with 800K. Another analyst looked at the same photo and came up with almost twice that. The key issue, as the professor mentions in the second article is the crowd-density number.

Meanwhile, for comparison, here’s the Obama inauguration crowd (at 11:19 a.m.). Note the dense clumps of people in dark clothing. It was cold that day and there were video screens set up for people to watch. So they cluster around them. To the Volgi’s untutored eye, it looks like a roughly comparable—or perhaps even smaller—crowd. What do you think?