Golden Owl Clues |
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GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE GOLDEN OWL |
At first glance, the Owl consists of 11 puzzles. All except one are in an identical format:
One riddle stands out because it doesn't feature a colorful owl head or a number. The latter is replaced by a letter, “B”. Quite quickly after the start of the hunt, Max Valentin admitted through the questions (Q/A) asked to him by the researchers on 3615 MAXVAL, that the enigmas as they present themselves in the book are not in the right order, that they must therefore be re-ordered, and that this is the object of enigma B. Another fact also appeared in the first months of the hunt: if the resolution of the 11 enigmas allows locating an “end zone” the size of a medium-sized city does not tell us where, within that zone, precisely the treasure is. Under torture, Max Valentin admitted that to this end, there exists a twelfth riddle, made up of the “remainders” of the previous riddles, and which the hunters call “super-solution” or SS.
The IS constitute aids to the understanding and deciphering of the enigmas, helping hands given by the author. Numerous at the start of the hunt (no less than 18 during the first year of the game), their flow then became rarer, and today the source has completely dried up: the last IS was published in the monthly PC Team in September 1996. It seemed useless to many hunters who thought that they had already mastered the “instructions for use” provided by this IS.
Disappointment therefore among some, who expected a real unblocking, but fury among others who, rightly or wrongly considering themselves "advanced" in the quest, protested against the grouping effect of IS which allows latecomers and newcomers to catch up with the others... Vain fear since it seems clear that the hunt has not really progressed for several years, but this change of mood among the "old hands" has convinced Max to no longer broadcast other IS .
But is it really so as not to displease some that the author remains silent in this way?
None of the so-called “advanced hunters” found the Owl; Max proclaims to anyone who will listen that he wants it to be found, firstly because he is starting to feel, I imagine, a bit of a prisoner of his creation (Conan Doyle syndrome!), then because he is impatient to be able to publish the book of solutions and shut up some of his detractors. SO ? Hunting almost at a standstill, author impatient to get it over with... Why not give some new decisive IS, in particular on the enigma 600 which I continue to think locks the game in?
Certainly, Max does not want (and this is commendable of him) to artificially speed things up. But beyond this concern, I simply think that he CANNOT give a decisive IS because the blockage is in fact much more tenuous than one thinks. In other words, there is not enough “meat” around the solution, not enough grist to grind to provide an IS without getting too close to the solution! This idea is based on the postulate that I defend, namely that the Owl is much simpler than we believe, and that the whole art consisted precisely in concealing this simplicity under an abstruse appearance... and there, the camouflage was well done!
I base this postulate of intrinsic simplicity on three observations:
Initially, the playing field is 550,000 square kilometers. On arrival, we located an 80 centimeter object “right on the spot”. Between the two, there is quite a zoom to do!
To go from 550,000 kilometers to one square meter, Max did not dilute the sauce, quite the contrary: of the 11 enigmas, one is used to give the order and that's it. There remain 10 puzzles, not one more, to find an area the size of a medium-sized city. The first of them gives the starting point and the second gives a general direction to leave this place, as well as a measurement which will be used later (let's leave aside the remainders since they are not used to locate the area).
What remains... 8 riddles only to locate a tiny "hat" on the map of France, likely the result of the imprecision of the lines...
As if that weren't enough, each puzzle is extremely concise!
These observations undermine, in my opinion, the Daboist theses (which I will talk about again) consisting of seeing Dabo as an intermediate or final solution to several enigmas.
Indeed, starting from the principle of conciseness, why would Max, knowing that apart from the order (riddle B), he wanted to “fit everything” into 10 riddles (plus the remainders), have gone to the trouble of repeating “ Dabo! Dabo! Dabo! » when all he had to do was say it once? If one thing is certain in The Owl, it is that the author does not repeat himself—simply because he does not have the space to do so! Dabo is part of the game, as the solution to the primary decryption of riddle 420 . And that's all. And if one thing is probable in the Owl, it is that the location of the cache has nothing to do with any of the places identified in the riddles, so as not to attract attention too early... but there, I'm starting to get to the bottom of it, and that'll be for later.
Read this extract from question no. 11 of March 17, 1997: “YOU WILL SEE (IF YOU FIND THE BIRD OR IF YOU READ THE SOLUTIONS IN THE BOOK THAT WILL APPEAR AFTER ITS DISCOVERY) THAT THEY WERE NOT AS COMPLICATED AS MANY OF PEOPLE THINK IT.FRIENDSHIPS -- MAX.” CFQD, right?
In order to intellectually and commercially relaunch the game at the time when Michel Lafon published the 3rd edition, a major promotional operation was organized in the summer of 1997 with Le Figaro Magazine . Note the chronology carefully: less than a year after the publication of the last IS and after the concession made by the author to certain grumpy “old hands” not to publish any more in the future, he will take advantage of Operation Figaro Magazine to allow information of the first magnitude to be disseminated, namely the order in which the puzzles must be re-ordered and solved, something that it had always refused to do since it amounts to confirming the exact solution of the puzzle B! This confirmation in fact resulted from the order in which the enigmas were published by Le Figaro Magazine, an order different from that of the book and which thereby validated the solution of enigma B...
I know well that later, Max will affirm (and I want to believe him) that the order in which the puzzles were published was the result of a decision by the journalists and that he did not endorse it... but how can we imagine, However, that he would have allowed such a publication to take place in an order which, not being that of the book, would not have been the right one, the true one either? Such an officialization of an erroneous order, "sanctified" moreover by the tacit imprimatur of the author resulting from the juxtaposition of his summaries and anecdotes (see below), is impossible to envisage. If the order chosen by the journalists (and which corresponds well to that of the vast majority of researchers) had been inaccurate, Max would certainly have insisted that the puzzles be published in the order of the book!
The interest of the articles accompanying the publication of the enigmas lay, in addition to a few juicy anecdotes, in the existence of summaries, written by Max himself, of the “madits” (see below). These famous madits (contraction of “Max told me”) are the answers given by Max to hunters' questions about the 3615 MAXVAL. For seasoned owlers, these syntheses have not brought any new elements. So where is their interest? In the fact that they are surprisingly short... Max answered more than 100,000 questions on Minitel... the disproportion with the size of his summaries is truly striking...
I'll let you draw your own conclusions which should, it seems to me, go in a very specific direction...
Coming back to the madits, they are in some way the equivalent of the gospels or the lives of the saints. All Owl hunters have "their" madits that they hold on to jealously and that no one else has ever seen... for the excellent reason that many of them practice "creative exegesis" by interpreting, distorting or quoting the author's words out of context... So beware of the madits and check it yourself. These verifications, previously costly since they required connecting to the Minitel 3615 MAXVAL server (now closed), have become much easier since all of the Q/A has been put online free of charge on the lachouette.net domain. , managed by Velo.
The excellent search engine associated with this database will allow you to very easily find the Q/A concerned, and we can hope that the better distribution of the Q/A will gradually put an end to the circulation of inaccurate or fanciful statements.
Another Maxian concept, these keys are described as elements of an enigma which allow “to approach the next enigma”. Since the keys do not help to decipher the enigmas but only to understand their approach, their exact nature, as well as their usefulness, are ambiguous. Do they give a tone, an indication of the atmosphere of what the enigma in question will be? Those of these keys which are known and confirmed (and which will be described on the relevant pages) seem to say the least banal and without much added value—but perhaps it is not the same as we progress in the game...
There you go, you now know a little more about how the Golden Owl presents itself... in my opinion! If what I write does not seem completely devoid of common sense to you, all you have to do is read, after this, the individual pages devoted to each enigma.
If you are interested in the Owl, you will quickly realize that you will need two cards. The first is a general map of France, in this case the Michelin 989 (see the IS FNAC on the IS page ), which exists in paper and laminated version. Two digitized versions also exist on the Nag website, see my Maps page . This card is only essential from enigma 500 onwards but, according to Max, the researcher can use it before (that one or another, for that matter) to report his findings and his results if he deems it useful.
Likewise, hunters are invited to report on this first map all the indications which are not there, and which they consider necessary to include there, remembering that the map is NOT A TOOL but just a sort of reminder. The rather reductive role that Max assigns to the map means that it does not provide any additional information which would be necessary to find the treasure and which would not result from the enigmas (by enigmas, I remind you that we must understand: titles, numbers, owl head symbols, texts and visuals).
There is still an element of sophistry in Max's position on this subject. Of course, the map itself does not “reveal” anything. We can therefore deduce in particular that the symbols it contains, the color or the number of the roads for example, are of no use for the game. However, only the use of the map and the creation of precise layouts will allow you to note, for example, the alignment of three towns or remarkable points... Without being a “tool”, the map will at the very least be a very valuable visual revealer. Enigma 500 being the 7th in the game, it's a safe bet that the novice owl will not wait until he has reached it before, for example, placing Roncesvalles on the 989 in enigma 470 and seeing what happens when we “look through the Opening” (Bourges)! However, it is only by resisting this temptation that we will avoid false leads: since the map is not yet obligatory, let us not seek to precisely identify the Light at this stage where we are not supposed to have only a general idea.
This second card, which it would be more accurate to describe as second since there is no other to use, must be, according to Max, “as precise as possible”. It will therefore be an IGN map from the blue series at 1:25,000 (Top 25).
With a little logic, it is very easy to understand how the first and second cards fit together. At the end of solving the 11 riddles in the book (10 riddles plus B which gives the order, see the pages devoted to the riddles), we obviously do not obtain a precise location since the Owl is less than a meter tall. large-scale and that it would be impossible to position it on a general map of France. So, what we get is "an area the size of a medium-sized city", without a particularly remarkable shape ("potatoid", says the author), so not a square or a triangle, etc.
How is this area obtained? Quite simply at the intersection of a certain number of routes made on the 989 to concretize the solutions of the previous puzzles. These lines necessarily contain a certain margin of error, the lines (at least three, probably more) do not intersect at a single point, but form a “hat” which delimits the area. It is this area which must be transferred to the second map.
Asked precisely about the question of margins of error, Max indicated that the game was designed to take it into account, and it is logical: not only do these margins exist in the layouts on the 989, but also in the operation of transfer of the “hat” to the second card. The area that you will obtain (at least, I hope so for you!) may therefore differ somewhat from the author's ideal layout without preventing you from locating the cache. For what ? Two reasons:
The cache is more or less in the center of the area. The precision of the contour is therefore not fundamental.
Solving the 12th puzzle (super-solution) using the remains of the previous 10 (since B does not contain any) should provide enough information to locate the cache inside the area, even if the perimeter of this is not exactly defined. The main thing is probably to identify the starting point of the final route to be taken within the area to the cache, and this identification should certainly be easy and unambiguous on the second map, even if your area is a little approximate or offset.
We naturally know very little about the appearance of the final site (the “spot”), which is one of the author's taboo subjects. We know that this is public land (therefore belonging to the State or a local authority), permanently accessible except in exceptional weather conditions.
Further developments on the particularities of the terrain can be found on the page dedicated to the super-solution here .
The spot is located under wood (see the shrub episode below), and very probably in a forest, state-owned or not, but in any case public. All that the author was willing to say about the afforestation of the site is that it “does not look like a bald man’s skull!” ". Max has been there several times since the start of the game and reports of these visits had been published on the Minitel 3615 MAXVAL server, now closed (see below ). Here are these reports, which I publish in capital letters as they were on MAXVAL:
Information given in GIGA, on France 2, October 21, 1993:
ON THE GRAVE OF THE OWL, I PLANT A SHRUB.
Visits on July 24, 1994, December 14, 1994, August 20, 1995 and March 29, 1996:
AFTER A VISIT TO THE SITE ON JULY 24, 1994—ONE MONTH AFTER THE RELEASE OF THE NEW EDITION OF THE BOOK—MAX OBSERVED THAT THE SHRUB PLANT ON THE GRAVE THE OWL WAS DEAD. ONLY A 25 CM HIGH DRIED STEM PROCEEDED.
DURING A NEW VISIT ON DECEMBER 14, 1994, MAX OBSERVED THAT THE STEM, BROKEN AT ITS BASE, WAS LYING ON THE GROUND. SHE WAS ALL BLACK AND ROTTING.
FINALLY, MAX HAVING TAKEN A LOOK AT THE SURROUNDINGS (100 MY AROUND), DID NOT SEE ANY VISIBLE TRACE OF A POSSIBLE PASSAGE OF OWL HUNTERS.
AFTER A NEW VISIT ON AUGUST 20, 1995, HE NO LONGER FOUND THE SlightEST TRACE OF THE SHRUB. ABOUT 130 M FROM THE CACHE, THE EARTH HAD BEEN DISTURBED, BUT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR MAX TO DETERMINE ITS ORIGIN. MAX PROBED THE GROUND TO TRY TO SEE IF THE EARTH WAS SOFT, BUT AGAIN, THERE WAS NO LESSON TO BE LEARNED. THIS MARK COULD JUST HAVE BEEN MADE BY AN OWL FINDER OR BY ANY ANIMAL WHICH WOULD HAVE SCRATCHED THE GROUND IN THIS PLACE. IF THIS MARK WAS THE MADE OF AN OWL RESEARCHER, IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE HOLE HAS BEEN PERFECTLY FILLED IN AND PACKED, BECAUSE THERE IS NOT THE LIGHTEST MUMULUS AS IS GENERALLY THE CASE WHEN PUTTING BACK IN THE HOLE. EARTH IN PLACE IN A HOLE.
MAX RETURNED TO THE SITE ON FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 1996. THE OWL'S GRAVE WAS INTACT, NOTHING HAD BEEN TOUCHED. HE INSPECTED THE SURROUNDINGS FOR 50 MINUTES WITHIN A 150 M RADIUS AROUND THE CACHE, WITHOUT NOTICED ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR: NO HOLE, NO MUMULUS. ACCORDING TO ITS FINDINGS, THERE IS NOTHING TO CERTAIN THAT THE SITE WAS VISITED BY RESEARCHERS, SHOVEL IN HAND. AS WAS SAID ABOVE, THIS VISIT WAS LIMITED TO AN EXAMINATION WITHIN A RADIUS OF 150 M, THEREFORE IN AN APPROXIMATE CIRCLE OF 300 M. 1 STEP = APPROXIMATELY 1 MET.)
Message broadcast on 3615 MAXVAL on November 9, 1996:
NOVEMBER 96: MAX RETURNED TO THE SITE AND OBSERVED THAT THERE WAS A BLOCKED HOLE AS WELL AS A SCRATCH MARK WITHIN A 150 M RADIUS OF THE CACHE. THE HOLE: IT WAS LOCATED ABOUT 125/130 STEPS FROM THE HIDE. ITS “QUALITY” OF HOLE IS IN NO DOUBT BECAUSE CLOCKS OF EARTH WERE VERY CLEARLY DISTINGUISHED. THIS HOLE WAS ABOUT 80 CM IN DIAMETER AND WAS ROUNDED IN SHAPE. IT HAD BEEN FILLED IN QUITE CORRECTLY, BUT A SMALL MUMULUS REMAINED. THE GRASS WAS NO LONGER Stained WITH EARTH, WHICH Suggests that this hole was not very recent and that the rain had had time to wash away the small vegetation growing on the edge of this hole. MAX PROBED THE MUMULUS, BUT WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO DRAW ANY CONCLUSION AS TO THE DEPTH, THE EARTH BEING WET. THE MARK: IT WAS LOCATED ABOUT 20 STEPS FROM THE HOLE. IT WAS HARD TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS ABOUT. THIS COULD BE THE MARK OF A FIRST ATTEMPT AT EXCAVATION MADE BY THE AUTHOR OF THE HOLE, OR A MARK LEFT BY AN ANIMAL. THERE WERE NO CLOGS, JUST SCRATCH TRACES. PLANT DEBRIS BROUGHT BY THE WIND LIE THERE. MAX TRIED TO PROBE THE GROUND IN THIS PLACE, BUT WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO DEDUCE ANYTHING FROM IT. THE GROUND WAS HARD 5 CM FROM THE SURFACE. IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM TO ESTIMATE HOW LONG THIS MARK HAD BEEN FOUND IN THIS PLACE. THIS MARK WAS NOT THE SAME AS THE ONE NOTICED ON AUGUST 20, 1995 AND WAS NOT LOCATED IN THE SAME LOCATION. MAX SURVEYED THE SITE WITHIN AN APPROXIMATELY 150 METERS RADIUS, AND STAYED THERE FOR 1:20 H. MAX DECIDED NOT TO RETURN TO THE SITE UNTIL THE OWL WAS FOUND. SO THIS WAS HIS LAST TRIP.
At the same time as Manya's publication of the first edition of the book Sur la trace de la Chouette d'Or in 1993, a Minitel service in 3615 was set up, hosted by the Softel company. This server, run by Max Valentin himself, contained a certain amount of general information on the game, such as the IS or the site visit reports reproduced above. The 3615 MAXVAL also allowed researchers, at a time when the Internet was not accessible to the general public, to have a discussion forum and electronic mailboxes (BAL), and offered them the possibility of grouping together in GR (research groups).
But above all, the 3615 MAXVAL allowed hunters to ask the author questions. Private for the first two years (exchanges were between Max's BAL and that of the author of the question), these “Q/A” (questions/answers) then became public in the summer of 1995.
Until the end of 2001, this server was by necessity, and despite the costs inherent to Minitel, a necessary point of passage for a large majority of researchers since it was the source of the famous madits . This means of communicating directly with Max was of great importance, not only for the intrinsic importance of the author's comments, but also because of the aura of mystery with which Max shrouded (and still shrouded) his true personality; a sort of privileged link could thus be established with the researchers, to the point that some became, for years, real MAXVAL addicts.
With the generalization of computers in the world of hunters, copying, processing, analyzing and summarizing Q/A became their weekly, if not daily, task. I thus, for my part, handled all of the public Q&A from the start of the game until the beginning of 1997, when, with the multiplication of hunts, I no longer had the time to commit myself to this work. Real life having suddenly burst into the long, quiet river of hunting, at the end of 2000 I had to opt for a “sabbatical” of more than a year.
Meanwhile, of course, the Q&A continued on MAXVAL. Feeling more and more "a prisoner of the Owl", Max continued to devote several hours to them each day, making no secret of his ardent desire for the Owl to be found without allowing himself to artificially accelerate the course of the game by disclosing key elements. Over the years, other projects have come to impose themselves: first the small MSN hunts , then Le Trésor d'Orval, the Paris-Match hunts, and finally the major global Internet hunting project brought to fruition on January 1, 2001. with the launch of TH 2001 — The Mask of Nefer .
Then came the day when, having provided researchers with more than 100,000 answers, Max decided to close MAXVAL. I didn't personally experience these moments, but I can easily imagine that the owls suddenly felt a little orphaned... There remains a fantastic database from all these years which was entrusted to Velo, host of the Chouette forum on antidabo.com (now closed), so that he makes them available free of charge to all researchers on the Internet.
Velo put this online at the beginning of February 2002 on the new domain lachouette.net , which also hosts the hunters' forum. It's a safe bet that in this wealth of information there is enough to relaunch the hunt for the Owl, the success of which continues despite the fact that the book has become impossible to find, except for occasion !
The Owl is, for Max, a youthful work. It was his first treasure hunt and, although he has since written many others, he admits that at the time he lacked reference points, which may explain why he estimated the duration between 8 and 16 months, when she entered her 10th year in April 2002.
That being said, there necessarily exist objective causes for the resistance opposed by the enigmas to the sagacity of tens of thousands of researchers. Intrinsically, according to the author, the Owl is not more difficult than certain other hunts that he subsequently wrote, such as Le Trésor d'Orval or Le Trésor de Malbrouck (also called La Toison d'Or ). By comparison, Max Valentin considers it “indecent” that the Owl remains untraceable.
In the light of his experience (because, between 1993 and December 2001, numerous researchers communicated to him all or part of their solutions on the defunct 3615 MAXVAL), Max is convinced that the responsibility lies with the false leads with which he deliberately strewn riddles. These false trails are not only much more numerous than in later hunts, but even much more refined, and therefore tempting for hunters.
Knowing that nothing is more difficult than calling into question “beautiful” solutions, especially when they are linked to several enigmas in a row, and also knowing that the researchers themselves conceive false leads that the author does not never imagined, we understand better why the Owl is still in his hole. What remains troubling is that researchers have known about Max's diagnosis for several years. They are therefore strongly encouraged to doubt their solutions, as soon as they lead them to a point from which they can no longer progress; and yet, the treasure remains unfound...
For my part, I have identified two other causes (one general, the other specific).
The general cause is that when stuck, researchers “guess” instead of forcing themselves to solve. I take a simple example: in riddle 600 , the primary decryption provides the sentence THE KEY IS HIDDEN ON A PERCHED BLACK SHIP. When a researcher reaches this point, his deciphering efforts cease and he attempts, by intuition, to guess what the Perched Black Ship (NPN) is. If he saw Fort Boyard on television, he will be tempted to see the NNP there; if he visited the cathedral of Maguelonne during his vacation, or if the castle of Peyrepertuse marked his memory, he will make them possible NNPs.
In short, everything that the researcher can draw from his experience or his culture is likely to do the trick, even if it means making the chosen entity fit a posteriori with what the enigma says—if necessary by forcing a little, but without ever asking: “How, starting from the enigma, can I honestly arrive at this result?” » This approach does not seem logical to me. Does this mean that, if the NNP is the Notre-Dame de l'Épine cathedral, and unfortunately I have never heard of this building, I have no chance of finding the Owl?
No. I think that the enigmas contain the elements necessary for their resolution without forcing researchers to speculate randomly from their knowledge or their experience, and in this regard enigma 36 of the TH 2001 hunt, also designed by Max Valentin, and which is among my “School Cases” , is particularly edifying.
The specific cause is precisely this enigma 600 which is , in my opinion, the real lock of the Owl. Max regretted, at the time of 3615 MAXVAL, that he was not asked more questions about this enigma, but this being, with the exception of its title, entirely encrypted, the researchers' questions were always clashed with the author's refusal to comment on things that do not appear clearly in the book. He just implicitly validated the decryption of the words “perched black ship”, in November 2001, a few weeks before the closure of 3615 MAXVAL.
It is true that, in the Owl, everything is linked to everything, but there is a particularly strong relationship between the NNP of the 600 and the becalmed Nave of the 560 (identical to the NNP); then, between the Nave and the Sentinels of the 650 (geographically close); finally, between the Sentinels and the final zone, as I explain on the relevant pages and on the Super-solution page . As long as the 600 is not “unblocked” (and there is now little chance that it will be with the help of the author!), hunting will, I think, have difficulty making real progress.
I acquired this conviction in 1996 after four months of research. I don't deny it today...
