orange nocturnal light

This happened when I was a young child. The date is based on a similar report I read about in Kevin Randle's _The UFO Casebook_(p. 141). My mother, grandmother, and I had stopped for dinner in El Centro, CA, and were westbound on I-8 when we observed a very bright, orange light to the north. Soon, the object began to emit a cloud of smoke or vapor, which was greyish- white. The light "blinked out" and then came back on several times during the sighting (I don't remember exactly how many times), leaving the cloud hanging. The light was stationary (yet it seemed to "move with us" as we travelled down the freeway) and was approx. 20 degrees above the horizon. My mother and grandmother were panicking, I was was very scared at one point and hiding my eyes; it was then that I heard them exclaiming that several smaller lights were emerging from the light, flew around it, then returned to it. Unfortunately, I myself did not witness this.  Finally, the light went out permanently and the cloud dissipated. One strange feature of this event was that our car was being tailgated by a semi during the duration of the sighting, rather relentlessly (I remember we were in the slow lane the whole time, but don't recall if my grandmother, who was driving, tried to "shake" the tailgater at any point by changing lanes). I'm posting this primarily to find out if anyone else was a witness to this, even though it was long ago.