Thousands of documents related to Amelia Earhart, the aviator who vanished in 1937 while attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world, were published online by the National Archives on Friday and billed as an effort to increase transparency about her disappearance, but Earhart experts said the collection was a dud.
More than 4,600 pages of documents were released, including at least one photograph and a number of documents that were already available to the public.
The wreckage of Earhart’s final flight, which she took with a navigator, Fred Noonan, has never been found, casting their disappearance in a sheen of mystery that has long enticed professional and amateur historians as well as conspiracy theorists.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement on Friday that this initial batch of declassified government records had been released and more would follow, after President Trump in September called for Earhart documents to be unsealed.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we will continue the work to end the weaponization of intelligence and instead focus the Intelligence Community on finding the truth and telling the truth, and ensuring the safety, security and freedom of the American people,” Ms. Gabbard said.
Richard Gillespie, the executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania, said that most of the documents released by the government were already available, including on his group’s website.
“A lot of the really good stuff on Earhart is not in the National Archives,” Mr. Gillespie said. “We’ve found it in other places and other archives and when we find stuff we put it up on our website,” which he described as “undoubtedly the best resource for primary source documents on Earhart.”
Many government documents related to Earhart became available after President Bill Clinton in 1995 reformed the declassification process.
Mr. Gillespie, author of the 2024 book, “One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy,” said that he was not aware of any key government documents that had not been accessible before Friday. “It’s all out there,” he said.
The National Archives did not immediately respond to a question about which of the documents were newly available to the public.
At least 20 documents in one batch of the files were stamped “unclassified” with dates in the late 1960s scrawled next to the stamp.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of “The Aviator and the Showman,” was unmoved by the document release. She said when it was announced, “I went to sleep not thinking ‘What’s going to be revealed?’”
In Ms. Shapiro’s view, and that of other scholars, there is already plentiful material that shows, as the government said in its official report, that Earhart’s plane likely ran out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific Ocean as she and Noonan were headed to Howland Island, a small coral atoll in the southwestern Pacific, to refuel.
The Earhart records were released after the Trump administration posted government documents related to other high-profile deaths, including the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
A collection that the National Archives posted online in March about President Kennedy did not provide any new revelations about the assassination, though documents with no obvious connection to the event gave historians new information about how U.S. intelligence agencies interfere with other countries.
Historians also found few revelations in a trove the National Archives posted in July related to the 1968 assassination of Dr. King.
The documents about Dr. King were released as Mr. Trump and White House officials were looking to divert attention from demands to release files related to the death of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Earhart document release also coincided with a period of intensified interest in Mr. Epstein and his connection to the president.
The Earhart material was posted online two days after House Democrats released emails that suggested that Mr. Epstein believed that Mr. Trump knew more about his abuse than the president has acknowledged. Shortly after those emails were released last week, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee made public more than 20,000 messages related to Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Trump has denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump made a sudden reversal and urged House Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files after he had tried to stop G.O.P. lawmakers from supporting the measure.
Amanda Holpuch covers breaking news and other topics.
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