It appears to be.
Frankly, the reason this whole thing hasn’t been debunked is because it follows a pretty clear pattern and it’s not hard to tell what happened: First a few kids told a story that may even have been true (but was not witnessed by adults present or even by all of the children at the time so either was not true or was a far more mundane event than the children believed), but bore little to no resemblance to the one that eventually got popularized (written accounts before the attention built didn’t even have the ship landing!).
What followed wasn’t just the incredibly leading questions and pressure for details seen above (which in children invariably produces bad information) but also a good dash of recovered memories (which even in adults produces information so consistently false that doing so is immediate cause for malpractice and the resulting memories are now considered a mental disorder in and of themselves!). So a disputed story by a few children then became a number of far more elaborate but very different stories by a larger number of children ... Read even more
