A huge, round, red orb hovering in the sky

It’s been years, so I don’t recall the exact date, or even the exact month, but I do know this event happened during late fall of 1990.  This happened on the outskirts of Lowell, in one of the more suburban areas along Andover St.
At approximately 9:30 PM I went outside to take the trash out.  It was raining pretty hard and I remember it being exceptionally dark that night.  I walked out the front door with the bag of trash and around the back of our house.  As I turned the corner from the side of the house to the back, I saw a huge, round, red light hovering in the sky almost directly above me.  It seemed really close- maybe JUST  above the trees (and certainly below the clouds), but it made absolutely NO sound.
It was large. if you hold a small paper plate at arm’s length in front of you while looking at the sky, that’s about the size.  The light was deep red, like a stop light, and in the 20 seconds I watched it, it didn’t flicker, fade, or pulse.  It was solid.  I remember thinking how strange it was that it was just glowing with no portion of the circle being any brighter than another and had no different characteristics - just one massive, solid, glowing orb in the sky.
At some point, I looked away to drop the trash into the barrel I’d been standing next to, and when I looked back, the orb was gone.  I waited a few more seconds to see if it would return, but it didn’t.
It’s been 20 years since it happened and I STILL think about it all the time, as if it just happened yesterday.  Every so often I search the net but have never found much until now, when I found NUFORC.  Reading through this site, just the Massachusetts section alone, I can’t believe how many people have had similar experiences.
On a side note, for reference purposes, the accounts I’ve read from July 4th 2010 and the subsequent videos all over Youtube from that night are very similar to what I experienced, except, in my case, the single orb was red, didn’t move and seemed closer to the ground (just due to the size difference).
Witness indicates that the date of the sighting is approximate.  PD