Awesome Light Display with Following

On the date of this sighting daytime temperatures reached the mid-90s, the night also warm and as I recall clear.  It was the eighth anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.  As darkness descended I was chatting over the fence, as it were, with a neighbor who was approaching retirement age; we often spoke like this.  Housing in our south-side neighborhood was modest single-family residences on smaller urban lots, with narrow driveways leading from backyard garages to the public street.  Lighting was typical of what one may find in an urban area in the late 1970s, that being mercury vapor street lamps.
 I do not know why we each paused in our conversation, what may have attracted our eyes, but we both halted at the same point and looked skyward toward the west, and perhaps 20° above the horizon.  The best I may describe what we saw was a small group of intensely colored lights, moving steadily and in formation, east by southeasterly.  As the group of lights approached what would be due southwest of our position, they halted suddenly.  And then the fun began.
 The lights no longer remained in formation.  They darted.  Here.  There.  Then there.  Changing position.  Appearing in this part of the southwesterly sky.  Then there.  The rapidity of movement, the intensity with which each craft changed direction, was absolutely startling.  The lights would dart and flash in the sky almost as if wishing to convey a message that could not be readily understood.
 Then the sky again was absent of these lights.  For a moment.  They reappeared again in the formation that initially caught my eyes and that of my neighbor.  In formation they resumed the same path at the same rate of speed as when we first observed these and before their awesome light show.  There was no audible sound.
 With a modest separation after the formation of lighted objects, we then observed two military jet aircraft on the same path as the formation and following at the same pace.
 My neighbor and I looked at each other.  "What the heck was that?" we both said to the other.  "I guess we'll never know."