U.S. intelligence officials and private experts are trying to make sense of the missiles they saw displayed in Pyongyang Saturday during a parade to honor the 105th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder.

The procession’s vast array of ballistic missiles included some models that hadn’t been seen in public before, U.S. intelligence officials said.

"We are currently analyzing the equipment displayed at this year's parade," the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said in a statement. "While some systems appear consistent with past public displays, others have not been previously observed."

 What isn’t clear is to what extent the new missiles are functional. In the past, North Korea has paraded fake missiles.

"I still don’t know what I saw," said Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California, who said he recognized "things that are familiar that have been subtly redesigned — or in some cases, not so subtly."

Another U.S. intelligence official added, "Pyongyang’s elaborate parade of weaponry was likely intended to telegraph to the world and its own people that North Korea maintains a viable deterrent. Unfortunately, behind the goose-stepping soldiers, parade of missiles and belligerent bluster, lies a country that at its core is only held together by its sheer brutality. As with many things with North Korea, the task is to discern the fact from the fiction. Were they displaying real missiles or just big green tubes?"

One of those tubes was the size of an intercontinental ballistic missile, experts said. But it’s unclear whether it was an actual weapon. Nor is it clear that North Korea has the technology to mount a nuclear warhead on such a missile.