The Mysterious Search For The Elusive Golden Owl: A Small Bronze Sculpture Buried Somewhere In France That’s Worth $275,000
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.
f11photo – stock.adobe.com- illustrative purposes only
Yvon Crolet, a retired engineer in his late seventies, had been chasing the owl for twenty years, but now he believes that the whole game was a fraud from the very beginning. He had decoded the riddles and traveled to the spot they had specified. However, he returned from his dig empty-handed.
In 2018, he filed a formal complaint against Becker and Hauser’s family, who had inherited all the materials and information related to the golden owl, in an effort to force them to reveal the solution to the puzzles. The legal case is still ongoing. Becker refuses to respond to Crolet’s accusations that he tampered with the game while the case is open.
He states that at one point, he tried to sell the owl because he had grown weary of the game, but now his interest in it has been renewed because he is fascinated by the large community of players that the game has helped to create. In order to maintain people’s enthusiasm for the hunt, Becker has replaced the old, rusted bird with a shiny new substitute.
Despite his frustration with the game, Crolet admits that it has a certain level of genius to it and that he enjoyed his decades-long search for the most part.
To this day, the mystery of the golden owl remains unsolved.
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