When French puzzle designer Max Valentin created the Golden Owl treasure hunt in 1993, he predicted it could be up to a year before it was solved. He died in 2009—and the treasure wasn't found for another 15 years. The BBC reports that Michael Becker, who illustrated the On the Trail of the Golden Owl book and took charge of the hunt after Valentin's death, announced Thursday that the treasure had been found. The search involved cracking 11 complex puzzles in the 1993 book that led to a spot in France where an owl statuette was buried—a replica that could be exchanged for a gold and silver statuette worth more than $150,000.
"We confirm that the Golden Owl countermark was unearthed last night, simultaneously with a solution upload[ed] to the online verification system," Becker said in a post on a Discord forum. "It is therefore useless to go digging on the location you assume to be the cache." In French, the owl is called the Chouette d'Or, and the thousands of treasure-hunters were known as chouetters. According to Liberation, the hunt "has driven generations of researchers to think, sometimes to the point of madness, for decades."
The clues to the puzzle can be seen here, along with some of the presumed solutions. The Guardian described them as a "combination of fiendish linguistic games, cartographical ciphers, historical allusions, and mathematical brainteasers" in a 2022 report on the hunt. Becker released more clues in recent years. On Thursday, some chouetters expressed relief that the search was finally over, while others said they suspected that the rules had been broken and the owl had been found by somebody who used a metal detector instead of cracking the puzzles, though the BBC notes that to get the original statue, the finder must prove they solved the puzzles. (More treasure hunt stories.)
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