1966 Roosevelt Dime With "5" On His Cheek?

I see nothing in those photos

Yes @sublime I agree that it does kinda look like a number 5. However, I think that it is actually just circulation wear and Pareidolia, much like I see an Xbox logo a little further up on Roosevelt's temple:

Ha. Thx. Maybe my head is in the clouds with this whole pandemic And having Illinois shut down right now! Thx for the input.

Yes no prob @sublime. I wasn't trying to be smarmy, but rather just show how if we look for patterns in randomness, we can find all sorts of things. That just doesn't make them real.

Yep, just like seeing animal shapes in the clouds.



to the CCF!

RiversXSMm, to the Community!

Interesting how much they have lengthened the necks on the hammer dies, they used to be much shorter than that. I wonder if that is a change that was made when they went to the horizontal striking presses?

HI @jbuck and thank you!

Hi @Coop - I was trying to find those images! Thank you!

The "5" is a relief element, and as you said, it would have been passed down the line, but it wasn't. It's only on one set of die pairs that we've noticed.

IMHO, this leaves two likely possibilities (there's more, but these seem the most feasible):

(1) Lint on the die created an incuse mark on the die making process before the die was hardened
(2) Some mischief (scratched in) - but they would have had to make it backwards... I don't think it would be that difficult... REDRUM.

I really like the lint mark theory because it's the most reasonable. However, when you look at the "5" anomaly close-up, it appears to be three separate marks. It's not impossible.... but it seems highly unlikely that 3 separate pieces of lint formed the shape. Not impossible... just very improbable statistics-wise. It's more likely someone carving a mark into a tree (backwards)

I've included a close-up here if you want to take a look. This is a later strike - Sorry, I didn't include the whole photo. If that's the same @Conder101, hi! I agree with you that this might not be a particularly rare variety, but I think it's spectacular when it's particularly pronounced. I think that's what makes it significant - Not what it is, but how it escaped detection for nearly 50 years

This one is meh. but I'm posting it because you can make out the lines

@Coop - The problem we're noticing is a "false 5" die pair like the one @sublime posted - it has some metal grain patterns that resemble the "5" in this variety (which I traced over). But these rain patterns are either higher or lower and sometimes on the chin. Complete Pareidolia, I agree 100%. But dangerous because of unscrupulous sellers. We've already seen one sold for close to $100 and imagine when the CPG comes out, if people aren't aware, there's going to be a lot of fraud.

It's why we hope the CPG doesn't put down Reverse MD as a marker.... That can make matters worse because on 3 (4?) of the die pairs that aren't the "5" variety, we've noticed some shelf doubling, some very extreme... Oh well - here's the photo!