Orange light splits into three pieces

Four of us stood on the porch on a warm, clear evening. I was watching airliners flying over at about 30,000 feet, headed to the airport at Charlotte, sixty miles away. The planes were just lights with no sound. They followed the same path, one every five minutes or so. Then another light came along, an orange light the looked just like the others, but this one split into three pieces.
I thought I had just seen a plane blow up and pointed this out to my three friends. We saw one of the three lights continue towards Charlotte while another turned north and the third light turned in our direction and seemed to hang in the sky. We assumed the light was at airliner altitude, but when I went out to the car to get some binoculars, I saw that the light moved against the backdrop of stars when I moved. This indicated that the light was much lower than we thought, perhaps only two hundred feet.
The light drifted slowly over town and we followed it in a car, easily able to keep up. At one time, we saw a series of fire balls shooting out of the bottom like a Roman candle. This scared us, but nothing happened. The light drifted out of town. We pulled into a church parking lot and got out to watch. The orange light suddenly accelerated very quickly and was out of sight in a few seconds.
Witness indicates that date is approximate.  PD