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Somewhere underneath the ground in France lies a small bronze sculpture of an owl in flight. Whoever finds the owl can exchange it for a prize of an identical owl that is cast in gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, and onyx. Today, that owl is worth 235,000 pounds or $275,000.
Régis Hauser, known under the pseudonym Max Valentin, buried the statuette in a location known to no one but himself. The location of the owl can be found by completing a series of eleven puzzles detailed in his 1993 book On the Trail of the Golden Owl.
Thousands of people attempted to crack Hauser’s codes and went around France, digging up the dirt. Nearly thirty years later, the hunt for the golden owl was still on since no one had yet been able to track down the treasure, becoming the world’s longest unsolved treasure hunt.
In 2014, Michel Becker, the artist who had created the illustrations for Hauser’s book and sculpted the owl, tried to sell the original golden owl after Hauser’s death, claiming that the game was now over.
He caused quite an uproar among the treasure seekers, and the courts stepped in to prevent him from selling the sculpture on the grounds that the owl technically belonged to the future winner.
In 2021, Becker wanted to reassure people that the owl could still be found. He dug into the same spot where Hauser had buried the sculpture thirty years ago. It took three hours before his pickax finally struck metal.
After abandoning the pickax and burrowing into the ground with his hands, he pulled out an object protected in a plastic wrapping, believing it to be the owl he had created.
However, when he removed the plastic covering the chunk of metal, he discovered that it was just an ordinary rusted metal bird. What had happened to the owl?
The only person who could answer that question was Hauser, but that was impossible because he had died twelve years earlier.
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