It starts the same way these stories always start: a blurry clip, a dramatic headline, and the promise that one “missing” piece of footage could finally settle the argument that has haunted America since 1963. This week, fresh posts are pushing the idea that a film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was supposedly kept out of public view for decades, and that it could confirm a massive 62-year conspiracy if it ever surfaced in full.

The reason it hits so hard is simple — people can picture it. Dallas. Dealey Plaza. A split-second that changed the country. And the quiet dread that maybe the public has only ever seen what it was allowed to see, while something sharper, clearer, more damning sat in a vault somewhere the whole time.

But the real story, the one that never goes viral, is that JFK’s assassination is already one of the most filmed and documented crimes in modern history. The famous footage isn’t a single reel — it’s a web of recordings, photos, witness statements, government reports, and decades of lawsuits, releases, and bitter fights over what should be public and what should stay redacted. The public obsession doesn’t come from a lack of material. It comes from the gaps, the contradictions, and the fact that the official conclusions never stopped feeling incomplete to millions of people.

The key point many people miss is that the U.S. government has, for years, been releasing assassination records through the National Archives’ JFK Assassination Records Collection and it’s not a small trickle — it’s a massive archive that has been expanded repeatedly over time, with certain pieces still withheld or partially withheld for various stated reasons.