Somewhere in France, a small statuette of a bird in flight has emerged from the soil in which it has lain buried for more than three decades. The quest for the golden owl, one of the world’s longest-running treasure hunts, appears finally to be over, reports The Guardian.
“A potentially winning solution is being verified,” read a post on the hunt’s official chatline, published at 6.11am on Thursday. “No more solutions may be submitted. Further information will be communicated as soon as possible.”
Just over two hours later, at 8.26am, came a second post on the Discord platform: “Do not keep digging! We confirm that the replica of the golden owl was unearthed during the course of last night, and a solution simultaneously submitted.”
The writer was Michel Becker, a French artist who illustrated Sur la Trace de la Chouette d’Or (On the Trail of the Golden Owl), a picture book published in 1993, and sculpted the gold-and-silver owl that was promised to whoever could first solve the clues hidden in its pages.
The hunt was inspired by Masquerade, the artist Kit Williams’ 1979 British bestseller that sold more than a million copies and sparked – until it was found, three years later in a park in Bedfordshire – a national search for an 18-carat, jewel-encrusted gold hare.
Under the rules of the French quest, whoever found the bronze replica owl was entitled to exchange it for Becker’s original, whose worth when the book was first published was estimated at 1m francs, the equivalent today of almost €300,000.
However, the finder also had to demonstrate that they had been led to the spot where the replica was buried by correctly solving 11 arcane riddles set by the book’s author, Max Valentin, and not by other means, such as a metal detector.