The hunt for the golden owl is over

A couple of years ago, at a party at my friend’s house, I wondered why her roommate wasn’t there. The answer was not what I was expecting: “Oh, she’s doing her treasure hunt.” I was startled and also rather intrigued. It turned out that the roommate, a fifty-something-year-old woman with a solid job at a French government institution, set off every year equipped with a book of riddles, searching for a golden owl hidden somewhere in France.

I remember thinking how much I loved quirky people and even feeling a little jealous of this hobby. In comparison, my own pastimes suddenly seemed a bit drab and unexciting.

I had forgotten all about that conversation – until last week, when the French media exploded with the news that the famous owl had finally been found. I texted my friend to see how her roommate was taking the announcement. She was devastated. Le Monde even issued a call for testimonies regarding the owl’s discovery. The comments, filled with genuine grief, made me realise that the end of the 30-year-long hunt had left many people with the sense of an enormous void.

Little did I know when I first laughed at my friend’s roommate that she was part of a community numbering tens of thousands of “owl hunters” across France. Since 1993, when the hunt officially began, these unyielding adventurers had searched France, and who knows how much longer they would have kept going if, on October 3, 2024, the bronze replica hadn’t been dug up. That replica will now be exchanged, along with the verified solutions to the riddles, for the real treasure: an owl made of gold, silver, and diamonds, worth over €200,000.

This hunt began back in 1978, when Régis Hauser, who went under the pseudonym Max Valentin, came up with 11 riddles and the idea for a game, similar to the ones he used to organise for corporate events. The following year, the British artist Kit Williams published Masquerade, an immensely popular clue-filled book that launched a nationwide hunt for a golden hare.

This evidently inspired Hauser and he chose the same format for his quest, which initially involved a golden egg. Hauser died in 2009.

In 1993, a French artist named Michel Becker sponsored the project, and insisted that the egg become an owl. Becker designed the mould for the treasure, its two replicas, and the illustrations for the book of riddles. The game was simple: solve the 11 riddles, find the treasure. (Unusually, he only managed to lay his hands on the solutions in 2020, after settling some legal disputes with Hauser’s heirs.)

It’s not unreasonable to think that once Becker, now 74, knew the answers, he would be eager to end the second-longest treasure hunt in history (the only known hunt that’s lasted longer is the “The Secret”, an American search which remains unsolved). Since 2021, he had nonchalantly dropped occasional hints on the dedicated Discord forum, which sparked anger among owl hunters who were making progress and who had spent years figuring out every step.

It was Becker who, with a short message on the same platform last week, broke thousands of hearts in one blow. “Don’t go digging!” he wrote, explaining that the Golden Owl countermark had been unearthed and the riddles had been solved.

“Since Thursday, I have been living in hell,” wrote a disenchanted Le Monde reader. “What a disappointment, I was going to dig this weekend!” added another.

To think that, in the age of PlayStation, Netflix, Snapchat, and TikTok, there are people out there who are genuinely grieving the end of a 30-year-old treasure hunt, one that also involves a significant amount of digging in the mud, is astounding.

Hauser was clearly a marketing genius. One can only imagine how much revenue he and his co-creators made out of the several editions of On the Trail of the Golden Owl they produced, as well as the paid riddle verifications, and huge amounts of merchandise. But beyond that, the quest created a powerful sense of shared purpose – a passion that swept up thousands of people. “It’s like a real mourning,” one owl hunter told Le Monde. “This was a community like no other.”