Strange Lights At Night

A couple of years ago when Mars was said to be the closest that it has been to the Earth in many millenia, I heard on the news that it could been seen with the naked eye. Me and my parents decided to walk up and down the street to see if we could see it.

After about 10 minutes we spotted a reddish looking star which we thought to be Mars (we later found out it was). After looking at Mars for a couple of minutes we were just about to head back inside when I spotted another smaller reddish looking star come out from behind (or maybe from the surface, who knows?) of Mars. This smaller 'star' moved to the bottom left diagonal, quite slowly. A couple of seconds later it stopped at what I'm guessing was at least hundreds of miles away from Mars itself.
Just to make it easier to understand I've included a small picture.



About 5 minutes later 3 smaller objects came out of the 'star'. 2 out of either side and out out of the bottom. They then circled the 'star' once until they were back to their original position.



After a couple of minutes of non-movement, they started to move again. This time they were moving back into/onto the 'star'. After these 3 object had disappeared onto/into the 'star', this 'star' moved back in front of/behind/onto Mars.

I havn't got any pictures to back this up so you'll have to take my word for it .

I was wondering if anyone has had any similar experiences or if anyone can offer any insight to what it was that I saw?

Thats one interesting sighting for sure, I can't even start to think of much of an explanation for it. Sounds almost like the start of the book of War of the Worlds (I think it was War of the Worlds) where the aliens fire their ships out of big cannons on mars.

Oh well, I'm sure someone will think of an idea of what it could be.

When I first saw it my first thought was that maybe it was a satellite. As satellites can sometimes look like stars if you see them at night. But then I realised, what looked like a couple of inches movement in the night sky must be thousands of miles. And there is no way that it is possible (for our level of technology anyway) to travel what could be thousands of miles in about 5 seconds.

It left me very confused .

Sorry about the double post, I forgot to add something to the above post and my browser is having a bad day and isn't allowing me to edit.

Just incase this isn't a Mars only kind of event and it happens quite often, I thought i should post the area I live in just incase anyone is from around the area and has seen something similar or seen any UFO's at all.

I live in South-East England, in the Essex area. About 10 miles away from London.