One craft stopped and vanished, a second encircled the area while emitting flares

At the time of the sighting, approximately 12:35pm, the skies were clear with 10-mile visibility conditions. I was, for a second time today, walking laps around my backyard to stretch my sprained left hip muscle, which is why I wasn’t at work. Now what I’m about to write might sound strange but considering this is my fourth or fifth sighting to leave me baffled, I’ve actually come to expect these types of sightings in my every day life. Specifically in the San Gabriel Mountain area near Pasadena I’ve witnessed dozens of craft that may very well be balloons of some sort since most that I see travel extremely slow and reflect the sun’s white light to appear like stars in the middle of the day.
As I paced in my backyard and turned to face the mountains, a dim gray-colored craft flying west to east caught my attention for some reason. It seemed to be at or above 30,000 ft traveling as fast as a plane, but I like to test things now by “transmitting” a telepathic thought out; something along the lines of, “If you can hear me, stop and reverse course.” I then used a helpful technique of finding a nearby tree branch as a reference point to not lose sight of crafts flying through cloudless skies. I followed this first plane-like object with my eyes, taking small steps toward my left to keep it in my sight as it flew eastward. Then it stopped mid-flight and I immediately thought, “Of course, another balloon about to drift in a new direction.” Then for the next 3 to five minutes it remained stationary, and gradually grew so faint that I lost sight of it.
Nothing spectacular, but I’ve learned the hard way that an initial disappearance does not signal the end of the experience. Patience is key. I scanned the same area of the sky for another couple of minutes before a craft reflecting or emitting bright white light at the same altitude and speed of the first came into my view. “Must be a plane,” I thought as it approached the spot where the first craft had vanished. Suddenly the second UAP begins circling that very spot in the sky. I’ve never seen a plane exhibit bird-like behavior and make full tight circles within a few seconds. My immediate thought was, “Nobody will believe this,” since I had left my phone in the house and couldn’t record video. As I became fully aware of what I was witnessing, the circling craft started emitting smaller white flares at different points perpendicular and outward of its circular path. I counted four flares in the first four “orbits” and then it circled for at least another 3 or 4 loops before continuing eastward like a regular plane for one or two minutes before I lost sight of it behind the neighbor’s tree.
Of course, I “transmitted” a message of thanks before I lost sight of it.
I went back inside the house and on my laptop, visited RadarBox.com to look up any possible flight using the playback history feature but nothing stood out to me that matched what I had seen.