[albionin]

Thanks. the color is about right. But flares don’t hang motionless and then zoom off and then stop again.

[Kirkwood]

You have no true frame of reference for speed or motion in an empty sky. Aircraft moving toward you or away appear to be motionless. Something that looks to be a mile long might in reality be only a few tens of meters long when you have no idea how far away the object actually is.

[steve86]

Military flares fooled me twice in life, once by the Yakima Firing Range and once on a Hawaiian island (forget if it was Maui). But your most of your sighting doesn't fit that profile. You have to be careful, though, of illusions where your mind draws lines to connect things where there is really nothing there. Like lines between the lights to create the outline of the body of a "ship".

I had a good sighting in the 60s, was in the afternoon after school, where a friend and I saw a bright point high in the sky, going in a straight line and followed by a fighter jet with contrail (F100 from Spokane?), when the bright point suddenly made a 90 degree zero radius turn and pulled away from the jet like nobody's business.