President Trump released a cache of unredacted classified documents on Tuesday related to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, but experts say the documents are unlikely to put an end to speculation about the infamous killing.

Trump told reporters on Monday during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that the new release would be about 80,000 pages, but he did not give additional information about what the files would include.

“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump said. “It’s going to be very interesting.”

The release was published on the National Archives website around 4 p.m. Pacific time and consisted of 1,123 PDF documents, including handwritten and typed reports. Several of the documents are blurry and challenging to read, probably because of aging and the quality of photocopies.

A cursory review of the release did not immediately yield any major revelations or challenge the well-established facts that Kennedy was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald while traveling in an open-topped convertible through Dallas. However, the vast drove of documents will take significant time for historians and The Times to comb through.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, said in a statement the release was “the most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s.” The nonprofit foundation keeps a public database of government records on Kennedy’s assassination.

“These long-secret records shed new light on JFK’s mistrust of the CIA, the Castro assassination plots, the surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City, and CIA propaganda operations involving Oswald,” he said. Morley noted that the records do not include any of the 2,400 new FBI files discovered last month.

Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told the New York Times he believes many of the documents had been kept classified to protect CIA intelligence-gathering methods and not because they contained inflammatory information about the assassination.

Despite the apparent lack of significant new revelations, the documents do contain many fascinating tidbits about the investigations that followed the assassination.

One report describes an investigation into Oswald’s connections to the KGB. Oswald lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962, and many conspiracy theorists have posited that he was acting on the Soviets’ behalf.

In the document, U.S. professor E.B. Smith states that his longtime Russian friend Slava Nikonov, a member of the KGB, reviewed “five thick volumes” the agency had on Oswald and is “now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”

Also among the files is a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in which he worries that the fact that Oswald was killed two days after the assassination may make it challenging to “convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” The memo was dictated on Nov. 24, 1963, the day Oswald was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby while he was being transferred by the police.

The records are just a sliver of the millions of pages of assassination-related documents held by the National Archives, most of which have already been made available to the public.

Even six decades after Kennedy’s death, researchers and the public remain fascinated by the assassination and the events surrounding it. And the possibility that the documents could reveal significant new information about one of the 20th century’s most shocking killings is enticing for scholars and conspiracy theorists alike.

“It’s almost a Shakespearean moment in American politics when you have this young, glamorous, charismatic president at the peak of his power — the top of his game — beautiful wife, wealthy family ... whose life was terminated in an instant by a struggling, failed drifter,” said John Shaw, a JFK expert and the director of Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

“The kind of implausibility of Kennedy’s life ending so abruptly and so seemingly senselessly is just one of those things that just stays with you. And it’s obviously stayed with the country for 60-plus years,” Shaw said.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was riding in an an open-topped convertible with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John B. Connally Jr. and Connally’s wife, Nellie, as their motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Crowds lined the streets and waved to the Kennedys as they drove by. As the motorcade was passing the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire was heard in the plaza.

Kennedy was struck in the neck and head and was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Connally was shot in the back but recovered.

Officials arrested a worker in the book depository building named Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and Marxist sympathizer who at one point tried to become a citizen of the Soviet Union. Oswald was killed by Ruby during a perp walk broadcast on live television.

Although the government concluded that both men acted alone, theories about the deaths have proliferated for more than half a century. The killing gave birth to multiple conspiracy theories that included the involvement of the CIA, a second gunman on a nearby grassy knoll, or that the Cubans or even Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson played roles in the shooting.

A Gallup poll published in 2023 showed that a majority of Americans continue to believe that Oswald did not act alone but worked with others in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

One reason other theories have likely persisted is that the government’s narrative that Oswald acted alone is just an unsatisfying explanation and story for the public, Shaw said.

“These other alternative theses make the story at least more complicated and interesting,” Shaw said.

The widespread conspiracy theories prompted Congress to pass a 1992 law mandating that documents related to Kennedy’s assassination be released within 25 years except for those that had the potential to harm national security. Trump released some of the documents in 2017 but agreed to delay the disclosure of others. Former President Biden did the same during his term.

But after taking office for a second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all government records related to the Kennedy assassination. He also mandated records be released about the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Shaw said that, even with the release of the documents, debate over Kennedy’s death would endure.

“The story will not end,” he said. “The discussions will continue about who really was behind the murder of John F. Kennedy. There’s always going to be the sense that, OK, these are the official documents. What else might be out there?”