AHA!—The Diabolical Canadian Death Poppy

U.S Army "Contractors" travelling in Canada earlier this year filed confidential reports that lead to a Defense Department espionage warning about mysterious coin-like objects with RFDs—radio frequency devices.

According to the Associated Press,

The worried contractors described...the coin-like objects, each marked with a sinister red dot...as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The mysterious coin-like object

"...did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it (the red dot) appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

One contractor believed someone had placed two of the mysterious coin-like objects in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

But the Defense Department subsequently acknowledged that it could never substantiate the espionage alarm that it had put out and launched the internal review that turned up the true nature of the mysterious coin-like object.

The true nature of the mysterious coin-like object? It was a 2004 Canadian Quarter adorned with the image of a red poppy, Canada's flower of remembrance, inlaid over a maple leaf. The 25 cent piece commemorated Canada's 117,000 war dead. Approximately 30 million of these coins imprinted with the dread Canadian Death Poppy were struck by the Royal Canadian Mint. The supposed RFD nanotechnology was the coating applied by the mint to keep the coins from losing their scarlet, so to speak.

Numismatist Dennis Pike of Canadian Coin & Currency near Toronto, Ontario, quickly matched a grainy image and physical descriptions of the suspect coins in the contractors' confidential accounts to the 25-cent poppy piece."

It's not uncommon at all," Pike said. He added that the coin's protective coating glows peculiarly under ultraviolet light. "That may have been a little bit suspicious," he said (...after he stopped laughing).

Meanwhile, senior Canadian intelligence officials expressed annoyance (between bouts of hysterical giggling) with the complete lack of intelligence in U.S. intelligence agencies.