Slithering group of lights cross the sky

Getting out of our car in our backyard on a clear night, many stars being visible, my wife and I look up to see an amorphous group of lights, almost like one body but seemed to have several lights w/in it. It was in the northern sky, traveling NE in a pretty straight line tack. They seemed fairly high in the sky, and could tell the group of lights was moving fairly quickly since I had only about 10 or 20 secs to view in my binoculars (which I happened to have with me), before they was obscured our neighbor’s roof. My wife described the group of lights as almost looking like a caterpillar, the way it slithered across sky path; they did not seem at all like a “normal” satellite or meteorites that we have seen many times. The group of moving lights were sort of “smudgy” or glowing like some comets we’ve seen, but it was obviously within the atmosphere (not a very far away as a comet would be). It seemed to move too slowly to be a meteorite. I ran to see if I could view it from our front yard, but about 10 seconds later, it was lost in a cloud on horizon.