I initially wanted to do a decent article on this, but I'm not sure if this would be the best place for it. I just read the original article as a funny bit of owl news, but as I read related articles, it touches on things from the French revolution to current legal cases and conspiracies.
I'll share a bit of the things that I've read, the links I have if you want to read more, and if there's decent interest, I could do more.
This is the original Guardian article that caught my interest while I was doing my weekly check for Owl News. Here's the first bit:
At 3.30am on the night of 23 April 1993, at a secret location somewhere in France, a man struggled in pitch-blackness to dig a hole in which to bury something stowed in his car boot. “I hadn’t even finished, and my hands were bloody,” he later told Libération. “When it was done, I went far away, to get breakfast. I looked at myself in the mirror at the cafe. I was barely recognisable, dishevelled, covered in earth.”
The man, who became known to thousands of French people as Max Valentin, had hidden a small bronze owl sculpture, instigating what would become one of the world’s longest treasure hunts. The site’s location could be divined by solving 11 riddles – a combination of fiendish linguistic games, cartographical ciphers, historical allusions and mathematical brainteasers – published in a book, On the Trail of the Golden Owl, that sent amateur treasure hunters poring over maps and scouring obscure villages with metal detectors. Whoever unearthed the owl would win an identical sculpture, made of gold, silver, rubies and diamonds, and worth 1m francs (about €150,000, or £126,000, in today’s money). But, with a puzzle-setter’s precision, Valentin died exactly 16 years later, on the night of 23 April 2009, with the owl still undiscovered. It’s still out there now.
But the hunt has led some to places of disillusionment, and worse. A few searchers began to doubt that the byzantine riddles had any definitive solution. One believed the prize was booby-trapped, and that Valentin was trying to kill him. Generally, the late gamemaster is revered, but Becker is a more contentious figure for some chouetteurs – especially after he tried auctioning the original gold sculpture in 2014, saying the game was null and void following Valentin’s death (the sale was eventually cancelled).
The prize, worth about a quarter of a million dollars:
I'll put more articles and links in the comments.
Chouette chouette!
Yes, I liked where they called themselves chouetteuers and chouettesses or whatever it was! ☺️