Sixty one years ago, President John F. Kennedy had breakfast in Fort Worth and then took a short flight to Dallas Love Field. He would travel – in a car made from a 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible – through downtown Dallas to a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart.

His motorcade reached Dealey Plaza and drove past the Texas School Book Depository at about 12:30 p.m. when he was shot. He was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital just over an hour later.

Conspiracy theories still swirl around JFK’s assassination, and each new insight into the fateful day of November 22, 1963 in Dallas continues to fascinate.

President-elect Donald Trump promised during his re-election campaign that he would delete all remaining government documents surrounding the assassination if returned to office. He made a similar promise during his first term, but ultimately caved to pleas from the CIA and FBI to keep certain documents withheld.

In 1992, Congress set a 25-year deadline to release the remaining documents stemming from the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

At this point, only a few thousand of millions of government records related to the assassination have yet to be fully released, and those who have studied the records released so far say that while the remaining files are declassified, the public should not anticipate any earth-shattering revelations.

“Anyone expecting a smoking gun that will turn this case upside down will be sorely disappointed,” said Gerald Posner, author of Case closedwhich concludes that the murderer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

For decades, debate has raged not only over whether Oswald acted alone, but also over whether the FBI and CIA could have stopped him.

When Air Force One carries Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy landed in Dallasthey were greeted by clear skies and enthusiastic crowds. With a re-election campaign on the horizon next year, they had gone to Texas on a political fence-mending trip.

But as the motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, gunshots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. The police arrested 24-year-old Oswald. He never came to trial, shot dead two days later by Jack Rubya nightclub owner, in the old Dallas City Hall building, now home to the University of North Texas-Dallas Law School.

A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, as president Lyndon B. Johnson set up to investigate the murder, concluded that Oswald acted alone.

Conspiracy theories still swirl, whether online, in books, or along the Grassy Knoll. Some dispute that Oswald shot Kennedy from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, now the home of Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

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In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be stored in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection of over 5 million records was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exceptions designated by the president.

Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had boasted that he would allow the release of all the remaining records but ended up withholding some because of what he called the potential harm to national security. And while files have continued to be released under President Joe Biden’s administrationsome still remain invisible.

The documents released in recent years detail how the intelligence services operated at the time, and include CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination. The former Marine had previously defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.

Some of the new documents don’t shed much light on the dozens of theories about the murder itself, but they raise more questions about what the government knew, when it knew it and what the killer was thinking in late 1963.

Mark S. Zaid, a national security lawyer in Washington, said what has been released so far has contributed to the understanding of the time period, providing “a stunning picture” of what happened during the Cold War and the activities of the CIA.

Posner estimates there are still about 3,000 to 4,000 documents in the collection that have yet to be fully released. Of these documents, some are still fully redacted while others only have minor edits, like someone’s social security number.

“If you’ve been following it, as I and others have, you kind of zero in on the pages that you think might provide additional information for the story,” Posner said.

There are about 500 documents that have been completely withheld, Posner said, and they include Oswald’s and Ruby’s tax returns. Those files, the National Archives says on its website, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirements.

Trump’s transition team has not responded to questions this week about his plans once he takes office.

From the beginning, there were those who thought there had to be more to the story than just Oswald acting alone, said Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the assassination from the building where Oswald made his sniper perch.

“People want to understand this and they want to find the solution that fits the crime,” said Fagin, who said that while there are lingering questions, police made “a pretty compelling case” against Oswald.

In 2021, lots of QAnon believers descended at Dealey Plaza, “hoping that John F. Kennedy Jr. would appear and herald the return of Donald Trump to the presidency.”

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said his interest in the assassination goes back to the incident itself, when he was a child.

“It just seemed so amazing that a very disturbed individual could end up getting away with the crime of the century,” Sabato said. “But the more I studied it, the more I realized it’s a very possible, maybe even likely in my view, hypothesis.”

Associated Press and Dallas Morning News archives contributed to this report.