On The Trail Of The Golden Owl (French: Sur la trace de la chouette d'or) is a French armchair treasure hunt book created by communications expert Régis Hauser under the pseudonym "Max Valentin" and illustrated by artist Michel Becker.

He came up with the idea for the puzzle in the late 1970s, and spent 450 hours designing eleven textual riddles, which together hold the clues to a final location and a cache, hidden somewhere in France.

Valentin designed the hunt to last for a few months and to be solvable by experts or amateurs, insisting that "If all the searchers put all their knowledge together, the owl would be found in....two hours".

[9] Valentin also included false trails in the riddles, which he admitted was normal in treasure hunt games,[10] but which he later regretted putting too much work into.

Some of the clues were refutations;[34] readers were looking for the owl in erroneous places such as Mont Saint-Michel and at Notre-Dame de Paris, and Valentin felt the need to publicly dismiss these solutions.

[40] The subjects were various, and Valentin detailed many parts of the game, including the elements of the final zone, and the techniques needed to interpret the eleven riddles.

Valentin closed the server on 13 December 2001, commenting that it had represented the highest level of "intelligence per square centimetre" in France.

[51] In 2011, Michel Becker, the co-creator of the hunt, claimed sole ownership of the Golden Owl statuette, and intended to sell it.

[49] The treasure-hunter association A2CO played an important role in the preservation of the prize, and the whole community raised petitions to support A2CO's lawyers.