Unknown Object in the Sky over Venice, FL

My husband Todd and I were walking our dog Levi in the backyard around 8:00 on December 23, 2012. He yelled at me that it looked like an aircraft was on fire. I ran out there and looked up in the night sky. It was cloudy but where there were breaks in the clouds we watched what looked like a fireball in the sky moving slowly like an aircraft from south to north. It traveled for a couple minutes and we watched the fire ball (we could not make out an aircraft). I told Todd that if it was an aircraft on fire it should be losing altitude but it looked like it was maintaining it. Todd then said to me "Did it just stop?" And I said it looked like it did - then it grew an enormous halo around it. I thought maybe it was a rocket that blew up because of the size of the halo and as high as it seemed in the air (extremely high - not at typical aircraft altitude). After a few seconds of just sitting there and growing this enormous halo it suddenly it started moving back at us, following the same pattern we had watched it move from south to north but now in reverse. It did not bank left or right. This time though what had taken it several minutes to do - took it just seconds (maybe just a minute) this time and as it raced south - the halo grew so large that by the time it got over the south horizon of our pond the halo literally expanded out or blew out and whatever it was simply disappeared. There was no feeling of a shock wave or any change in the atmosphere around us when it 'blew out'. I cannot explain it. I reported it (at the risk of sounding like a lunatic) to the Sarasota Sheriff's Office. The halo started off red but as it traveled over us to the southern horizon it changed colors to lighter red, then orange tinted then almost cream colored at the time it blew out. It also appeared that when it reversed it's pattern, it came back at a much lower altitude and actually frightened us.