03 Jul 2000

Ed <metasyn@aol.com>

Scientology PR claims that there are 8 or 9 million members worldwide. That this is utter fiction has been shown in several earlier posts by "Warrior" and others. I'm not going to try to repeat that material here.

Following are some fairly solid numbers for whatever they are worth.

Scientology OnLine names: Following are counts of the number of individual names listed in the indexes by countries and US states. Each name connects to one of the cookie-cutter websites. The numbers I've listed are as per March 2000 and there seem to be few changes since then.

USA and Puerto Rico -- 8577 total

California - 3778
Florida - 1575
New York - 349

Other states and PR - 2875 total, as follows
Alabama - 6
Alaska - 11
Arizona - 119
Arkansas - 1
Colorado - 72
Connecticut - 108
District of Columbia - 27
Delaware (*) - 9
Georgia - 129
Hawaii - 35
Idaho - 1
Illinois - 210
Indiana - 27
Iowa - 6
Kansas - 50
Kentucky - 16
Louisiana - 53
Maine - 17
Maryland - 43
Massachusetts - 132
Michigan - 86
Minnesota - 77
Mississippi - 9
Missouri - 97
Montana - 1
Nebraska - none (state not listed)
Nevada - 148
New Hampshire - 23
New Jersey (*) - 152
New Mexico (*) - 60
North Carolina (*) - 32
North Dakota - none (state not listed)
Ohio - 128
Oklahoma - 12
Oregon - 154
Pennsylvania - 80
Puerto Rico (*) - 82 (PR is not a state)
Rhode island (*) - 5
South Carolina (*) - 19
South Dakota (*)- 2
Tennessee - 19
Texas - 178
Utah - 142
Vermont - 4
Virginia - 106
Washington - 120
West Virginia - 9
Wisconsin - 36
Wyoming - 2

(*) - these indexes don't come up when you click on them in the list of states because of error in the linking HTML, but if you make the right fiddling in the URL you can get them.

Today many other states' indexes don't come up. They return a message like this:

Reason: URL has unsafe spurious path elements. Cannot continue. /cntinent/namerica/USA/Oklahoma/index.htm

But... the URL shown in the message is wrong, because the real URL in the link has a backslash (\) instead of / between the state name and "index.htm" and some of the links also have two slashes (//) rather than one between "scientology.org" and "cntinent". Either error ruins the link and shows unbelievable ignorance.

Canada - 413

Central America, S. America, and Caribbean - 497, as follows:
Mexico = 371
Argentina - 21
Brazil - 2
Chile - 17
Colombia - 33
Dominican Republic - 7
Ecuador - 30
Guatemala - 2
Jamaica - 1
Venezuela - 13

UK, Scotland, Ireland 1152 as follows:
United Kingdom - 1124
Scotland - 24 (listed separately from UK)
Ireland - 4

Europe 3464 as follows:
Austria - 67
Belgium - 34
Denmark - 249
Finland - 9
France - 370
Germany - 597
Greece - 33
Hungary - 6 (uh, how many missions or WISE businesses was it??)
Italy - 1139
Macedonia - 1
Netherlands - 104
Portugal - 43
Romania - 2
Russia - 407 (in Cyrillic)
Spain - 126
Switzerland - 297

Africa 228 as follows:
South Africa - 227
Tanzania - 1

ANZO 847 as follows:
Australia - 746
New Zealand - 101

Asia 376 as follows:
China - 1
India - 2
Israel - 43
Japan - 188
Taiwan - 119
Thailand - 3

English speaking countries 11506
Non-English countries 4337
(Note: non-English people in S. Africa and Puerto Rico probably about balance the native English speakers in the Europe and Asia listings.)

Grand Total 15843

So there were that many names in the indexes at some point in March 2000. These are certainly a large part of the active Scientologists at that time who were public and willing to proudly declare their religion to the world. The listings don't seem to include staff and Sea Org members.

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The LA Millennium Event: about 15000 people +/- a couple of thousand attended this epic attraction last December. Months of publicity and pressure focused on the event and public in southern California were urged to bring family and friends to help fill it up. Surely any serious Scientologist would have been interested to see what DM was going to say on this occasion.

Certainly a sizable fraction of the active Scns from anywhere within a couple of hours of LA would attend as well as a smaller number of people from out of the area. Large numbers of staff and Sea Org did attend the event, so the number of "public" attendees was probably just slightly over 10000.

The largest concentration of Scientologists in the world has been in the LA area since the SO orgs were established there thirty years or so ago. Anyone in or out of Scn can tell you that. Perhaps 40% or 45% of the world's staff and SO are in California. About 23% of the Scn Online names in the world are there, and they only could pull in 15,000 to the event. When I crunch those numbers I get something like 50000 as the world membership including staff and SO. (I don't include a calculation here because I haven't figured out the best way yet.)

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Glendale: This part of greater LA has the largest concentration of longtime public Scns in the area. The "Who What Where" directory there -- a little book of phone listings and ads for Scientologists' businesses which is distributed among the Scn community of LA -- has only 251 listings of people and busineses in its white pages.

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Clearwater -- Florida has 1575 Scn Online names and I'd estimate that probably 1400 or 1500 of those connect to Flag rather than Miami Org or Orlando. It is often claimed that there is a community of several thousand Scns in the CW area and that as many as 2000 people a month come to Flag to do get services. The actual numbers are hard to get at, but the number of visitors has to be inflated. The reality is a lot of these supposed 2000 people live in the CW area and occasionally go to Flag, but the image presented is of the people who breeze in from Europe or LA for some auditing, meanwhile spending freely and boosting the local economy. A study of the Flag Completions listings from Source magazines would suggest that there aren't that many visitors from outside and there are not very many new people either, however I don't have details I can release at this time.

Sure aren't any millions of members, not even hundreds of thousands, just an incredibly audacious PR operation that repeats their lies until they are accepted.

Ed