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.
