In a forest in northeastern France, near a town called Dabo, three stones sit in a triangle. For most hikers and tourists who walk by them, the stones are a neat little novelty. For thousands of people, however—those carrying maps and shovels in their hands, and theories in their heads—the stones became a decades-long obsession.

Now we know they’re the official endpoint of one of the longest—and strangest—treasure hunts ever.

For 31 years, players took part in a notorious French puzzle called Sur la Trace de la Chouette d’Or, or “On the Trail of the Golden Owl,” solving riddles in hopes of finding a buried marker somewhere in France.

The hunt came to a close on October 2, 2024, when a team of “chouetteurs”—the searchers who spent years, if not their whole adult lives, playing the game—recovered the verified countermark buried at the cache, to be redeemed for the grand prize.

At the time, organizers confirmed the find but kept the exact site and solution under wraps. Then, in May 2025, they revealed the marker’s hiding place in a documentary, and later, a PDF: 6.93 meters from the center of that triangle, at the Borne Saint-Martin stones near Dabo.

The puzzle lasted for so long, it outlived one of the two men who created it. But finally, here was an end to the mystery.

Or so it seemed.

The Hunt for the Golden Owl

The game began in 1993 with a book of 11 riddles by Régis Hauser (pen name: Max Valentin) and illustrations by artist Michel Becker. Solvers had to decode the clues, extract a final “supersolution,” find a buried bronze marker, and exchange it for the real prize: a 22-pound, gold-, silver-, and diamond-set owl sculpture originally valued at 1 million French francs, roughly €150,000 at the time.

For a contest with so many twists and turns, the setup was surprisingly simple. And the solution, it turned out, was also pretty tidy: It traced a route through a chain of locations—Bourges, Roncevaux, Carignan, Golfe-Juan, and finally Dabo—before tightening around those Borne Saint-Martin stones.

One of the treasure hunt’s riddles asked solvers to identify the “sentinels,” or physical markers tied to the final location. According to the official solution, they were the three stones themselves. Some of their numbers had already showed up in earlier clues; the numbers that were left (4, 1, 8, and 8) added up to 21. Using the hunt’s unit of measurement, the 33-centimeter French foot, that equals 6.93 meters: the exact distance from the center of the triangle.

The ultimate location of Dabo wasn’t especially shocking. It had been a major theory for so long, in fact, that the chouetteurs who suspected it even had their own nickname: Daboists. (Yes, this whole thing has levels.) “Everyone went to Dabo, but nobody ever found anything,” one longtime searcher told Le Monde, via translation.

That was the problem. For decades, veteran hunters had studied, walked, and dug over the area, to no avail. Some thought the final solution felt too simple, too anticlimactic. Others took issue with the winners, who didn’t reveal their identities in 2024—and still haven’t.

But the most heated arguments center around what, exactly, the winners found.

A Mystery That Lingers

According to the official published timeline, Michel Becker—the puzzle’s original illustrator—went to the cache with a bailiff in October 2021, using solutions from the heirs of Valentin, who passed away in 2009. Becker didn’t find the original bronze countermark numbered 1/8, but rather, a badly corroded ferrous bird. Becker swapped it with a bronze replacement countermark, numbered 2/8, so the hunt could continue. The winners found the replacement marker on October 2, 2024.

The bailiff’s 2021 report says the object Becker removed wasn’t bronze. In the report, Becker states that the object he found appeared to have been substituted for the original bronze marker, so he placed a new countermark in the cache.

And that’s the crux of the drama: If you accept the official record, Becker kept the hunt going after he found the original marker was missing. But if you reject it, the 2024 discovery looks less like finding Valentin’s buried token and more like digging up a new one planted by the guy who took over for him.

On April 30, 2025, the Association des Chercheurs de la Chouette d’Or (A2CO), a group of long-running searchers, declared they were in the second camp when they filed a fraud complaint against Becker, arguing that the hunt hadn’t truly been solved.

Their main complaint, according to the French news outlet 20 Minutes, was the number on the recovered countermark: 2, not 1. A2CO’s question was blunt: “Where is countermark No. 1?” While Becker acknowledged that he placed the countermark 2/8 in 2021, he said he did it under the bailiff’s supervision, and only after following the solutions that Valentin’s heirs provided.

Becker also may have influenced the final solve, according to some critics. One anonymous winner said they finally figured it out after watching a Becker video “on loop” and spotting a clue, according to a Le Monde report. That complicates the ending: The Golden Owl started as a puzzle built by Valentin, but finished in a very different environment shaped by Becker’s stewardship, hints, and an ongoing relationship with the community.

Becker has responded by pointing to the official solution book, which includes the full contents of Valentin’s solutions, along with material meant to support their authenticity and explain the record of the hunt. Becker also told Le Monde the cache had been “validated and verified by bailiff” as the only possible location matching the book’s riddles.

The legal issues went beyond the hunt itself. In April 2025, a critic of the hunt, Yvon Crolet, was convicted of defamation after calling the game a scam. That September, however, a French appeals court overturned the case, finding that it fell outside the statute of limitations.

Even the next hunt has been dragged into the mess. Becker announced a follow-up, “Le Rapace et la Proie,” as the next Golden Owl adventure. But in May 2025, he temporarily called it off, citing “denial, criticism, unfounded rumors, harassment, and insults,” according to a statement he posted on Discord (translated from French):

With regard to an author who is now deceased, such a hateful and outrageous campaign is entirely inappropriate and simply reveals the denial of reality maintained by disappointed players—the same ones who, a few years earlier, were urging us to relaunch the game at a time when we could have chosen to end it.

Shocked by this toxic climate, the co-authors, collaborators, partners, and I have decided to suspend the continuation of the game. The Golden Owl will return under other skies, in other hands, devoted to more positive passions.

Le Monde reported that the first riddle of Becker’s new hunt would no longer appear in the solution book, and that Becker described the sequel as postponed rather than canceled. The current official hunt page still lists the launch as “à venir”—to come.

So where does that leave the Golden Owl now? While “X” officially marked the spot and the winners received their prize, the original bronze countermark—numbered 1/8—remains unaccounted for. For some chouetteurs, that’s enough to keep the treasure hunt going.

Max Valentin designed the Golden Owl as a puzzle with a clear ending. It now has one—and a community still arguing over whether it counts.

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