Crowd more than a million, may be record

(ChicagoBreakingNews.com) - More than a million giddy spectators convened on the national mall to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office today, but it is unclear if the crowd surpassed the record believed to have been set three and half decades ago at Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 inauguration.

Though early estimates Tuesday ranged as high as 2 million, satellite images of Obaam's swearing-in suggested the actual size of the throng may have been closer to half that, according to Clark McPhail, a sociologist who has been analyzing crowds on the mall since the '60s.

"It was sparser than I thought," said McPhail, an emeritus sociologist from the University of Illinois. "There were lots of open spaces."