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A mysterious series of glowing 'rocks' spotted from New Mexico to Montana has been identified as a Russian spy satellite.

Witnesses described it as three 'rocks' with glowing red and orange streaks and saw the bright object break apart as it moved slowly northward across the night sky.

Experts today said it was part of a Russian spy satellite that fell from orbit and burned up over Colorado and Wyoming - even though Russian officials have denied the claims.

This Animation of frames acquired by the Cloudbait Observatory at the DMNS Location clearly shows the south-to-north motion of the object 

They say it was part of a Russian spy satellite that fell from orbit and burned up over Colorado and Wyoming.

More than three dozen witnesses filed reports about the unusual sighting, which happened around 10:30 p.m. MDT on Sept. 2.

'A meteor would have burned too quickly to be seen over such a vast area', said Mike Hankey, the American Meteor Society's operations manager. 

He added that fragments from the object were even big enough to show up as a weather event on radar just east of Cheyenne.

The object probably was a piece of Russia's Cosmos 2495 reconnaissance satellite, launched in May, said Charles Vick, an aerospace analyst with military information website Globalsecurity.org. Cosmos 2495 was designed to shoot reconnaissance photos and send the film back to Earth in capsules. 

It delivered film to Russia as intended, but some pieces of the craft remained in orbit until falling over the Rockies, Vick said.

The U.S. Strategic Command, responsible for American nuclear warfighting forces, confirmed that Cosmos 2495 re-entered the atmosphere and was removed from the U.S. satellite catalog Sept. 3.

Social media has been full of unexplained sightings in recent weekends, including this one seen over the 

The satellites are designed to keep an eye on the same things they kept an eye on during the Cold War, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. 'Deployed hardware, airplanes, ships, tanks, factories, new intelligence facilities, all that stuff,' he said.

The satellites are looking for targets for their nuclear weapons, Pike said. 

What is it? The meteor was the latest in a string of unexplained sightings. This object light lit up the sky from the West Coast of the country to the East Coast last weekend

'They're looking for the same things that our spy satellites are looking for.' 

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, estimates that there are 98 operating spy satellites in orbit, launched by at least six nations.

The mysterious series of glowing 'rocks' was spotted from New Mexico to Montana (pictured is Signal Mountain in Wyoming)

Of those, 37 are from the United States, 30 from China and just three from Russia, he said. Many of those satellites are old, and probably half are in full operation, McDowell said.

Gen. William L. Shelton, former head of the U.S. Space Command, has said about 1,100 satellites orbit the Earth, and the U.S. Defense Department operates fewer than 100.

Meteor puts on light show in American Midwest

Russia has more than 100 satellites — including reconnaissance, weather and communications. 

Their military satellites have been operating normally, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman told the ITAR-TASS news agency Sept. 9.

'One can only guess about the condition representatives of the so-called American Meteor Society were in when they identified a luminescent phenomenon high up in the sky as a Russian military satellite,' said the spokesman, Igor Konashenkov.