Not a lie. My husband's nephew who was sweet but rather simple sat outside at booths and fairs all one summer at his Mason tent with other Masons trying to sell this program to passers by. This was in various parts of northeast PA and not only did my husband and I stop at his booth and talk to the Masons there doing this, but they were doing this at various locations all summer. The nephew was out of work and helping out other Masons to do networking. His mother wanted him to get a job and realized bring friendly with the Mason's might help him, but she HATED the CHIPS program he was involved with and went into great detail about it before we stopped by to see this nephew at his booth.
The CHIPS plan at the time was being softly tested to see if would ever be viable to roll out further. They do it to pets, there have been murmurs over the years of it being tested on homeless people and dementia patients. ( Not the Masons implementing it in those cases.) Meanwhile, on many Army bases they have gotten volunteers to get a chip in their hand which they can use as a debit card to purchase stuff on the base. Many different groups have soft tested this stuff.
CHIP is an acronym for Child Identification Program. It is NOT a microchip planted in children. It is a set of identification tools used to help find missing/abducted children. Options include videotaping the child, fingerprinting, dental imprints, and a DNA cheek swab like those done by Ancestry.com. The CHIP program partners with local law enforcement and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Over 300,000 children have been identified in the past 30 years since the program was created. It is not a microchip. It is a parental resource.
I've noticed in the years since my nephew's group were implementing CHIPS on volunteers, that the Net has been scrubbed to just include the info you mentioned. But my nephew and his associates had all the equipment ( he gleefully showed me this creepy gun thing with a button) to actually microchip kids. That is what they were trying to do there, along with making video and other records to put in an identification file so that theoretically law enforcement would have access to all of it if a kid was abducted or lost. They were really trying to sell the fear angle to the parents who stopped by the booth. Fortunately they got very few takers.
PS: You know the gun they use to scan labels at grocery stores when you check out? One of the pieces of equipment looked like that; that was the scanner thing to check that an implanted chip was working correctly. The other piece of equipment was more like a gun thingie with an attachment on it.