Baseball sized blinking red light in gravel pit Ut

As a child walking across a gravel pit late at night. A friend and I saw a red blinking light in the distance. We approach and I bent to pick up the small blinking object. It shot in to the air just before my hand would have closed over it. It flew NNW out of sight in less than a second. There was no one else around and it had been sitting there for some time blinking while we walked toward it trying to guess what kind of toy it might be. This was in 1978 and we had no technology that I could compare it to at that time. The only sound we heard was the sound of it breaking the wind as it shot away at such speed it left a red tracer in my vision. The odd thing is even as close as I got the only real details I could make out was the red light the rest of what ever it was was blurred to my sight. We ran scared and never talked about it again. I have done my best to be brief but thought it relavent as I have never heard any other UFO sightings that involved something as small as this object seemed to be.