Unknown Date Buffalo Nickel Weight Is Off And Not Sure What Is Up With This Coin?

I'm seeing some odd things on this coin... I wish it was cleaner and could make them out!! Does anyone see a second S in cents on the reverse? I've also been trying to decider the date but It looks like there are date numbers not exactly aligned with where they should be. Doesn't make sense but as I know they are stamped with the rest of coin but from different angles it really looks like another date with different font. Any thoughts on the second "s" after cents?

I was thinking along the same lines as nickelsearcher.

I can't see the coin clearly enough through the surface crud to comment directly on the second S - but I can suggest that you are experiencing Pareidolia.

Click on the hyper link to learn about how your brain organizes random patterns into an image that makes sense - but in reality does not exist.

This may help seeing the double S. I will try and get better pics when I can.

Whenever multiple oddities appear on the same coin, always try to find a single explanation for all of the oddities, rather than conjecturing some fanciful chain of highly improbable events to cause the coin's features. In this case, there is one clear and obvious candidate:

Corrosion.

Lost mass? Corrosion causes mass loss. And yes, a corroded coin can retain many fine details of a coin's surface, if the corrosion agent attacks the entire surface of a coin evenly. Consider a "coca-cola coin" as an archtypical example: dunk an ordinary copper penny (not zinc!) into a bottle of coca cola and leave it there until the fizzing stops. The resultant coin will be smaller and thinner and much more lightweight than before, but still be clearly recognizable as a penny with all the features and lettering still visible. Here's a Canadian example.

Odd surface features? Corrosion causes these too. If the corrosive agent isn't quite completely uniformly spread across a coin's surface, then some parts of the coin will be attacked more strongly than others. This creates random raised and lowered lumps and bumps.

Whenever you find an extremely damaged, corroded coin, always assume that anything "odd" you see on it is as result of the damage and corrosion. You'll save yourself a lot of heartache that way.

Finally, you expressed concern over cleaning it. Don't worry, it appears it's already been (somewhat) cleaned. All that lost mass would have leached into the surrounding soil, and this would have had to have been cleaned off just to get it into its current state. Metal detecting and other ground finds are usually OK to clean, since the coin will never be anything other than a "corroded coin". A "cleaned coin" might not be worth much, but it's worth more than a "corroded coin".

a very eroded nickel. the loss of material can account for the weight, especially if it started out lighter than normal.