The following makes everyone look bad...

'It wasn't valuable stuff' By David Arnold, Globe Staff, 06/01/98

Stephen Kiesling, Yale graduate and Olympic oarsman, became the darling of academic archeologists in 1994 when he wrote ''Walking The Plank,'' a scathing critique of how Barry Clifford financed and documented the underwater excavation of the pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod.

''The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in how treasure hunting works,'' Dr. Ricardo Elia, a Boston University archeologist and longtime Clifford critic, gushed in a subsequent review in Archeology Magazine.

Just last year, Kiesling was invited to chair a roundtable discussion about the practices of treasure hunters at the annual meeting of the Society of Historical Archeology - an organization that doesn't let the likes of Clifford through any door - or his pirate exhibit into any museum where they can block it.

There's just one thing Kie