I was vacationing with friends and our children. It was the end of a full day and I went out onto our fourth story balcony to have a cigarette. I was relaxing, leaning against the rail, looking at the ocean and listening to the surf and wind. I had been alone on the balcony for a few minutes and had looked up and down the beach several times. There were a few people out on the beach. Some young kids were playing football or frisbee and there was a woman running through the surf with her black lab. I had seen lots of the sightseeing helicopters during the daylight hours and had seen some large commercial airplanes flying in from over the ocean on what appeared to be landing approaches to an airport south of our hotel. I saw a plane with its normal flight lights coming in along the same path I had seen many other times, but as I watched it coming towards the coast I noticed a brighter light just off the coast. The brighter light appeared to be either hovering or moving quite slow and seemed to be in front of one of the other hotels to our south, so my first thought was that it must be another one of the tour helicopters, but when the airplane was out of hearing range, the object I was looking at was obviously far to quiet to be a helicopter. I noticed the orb slowly becoming brighter and felt it was moving north. It appeared to be 100 or so feet above the ocean and staying 100 yards off shore. The light was similar to an oil lantern in terms of color, brightness, and pulsing/fluxuation. And the flight pattern seemed slightly erratic like a balloon in the wind, with quick short shifts from left to right and up and down, but the shifts did not go off more than a foot or so. Aside from the slight shifts the path of the flight seemed quite determined because the light continued travelling north along the coast even though the wind was blowing rather hard and in gusts towards the west. After watching it travel for several hundred yards (1/4 mile) I motioned for one of my friends to hurry out to the balcony with me. She is a very level headed person and I knew she would make sense of what I was looking at. But after watching the light herself for a few moments and becoming equally perplexed by what we were witnessing, she called gestured for her husband to join us on the balcony. He had been asleep and was about to go back to bed so we had resisted bothering him at first, but we had become so intrigued that we needed another point of view. By the time he came outside, the light was almost directly in front of us and at its nearest point to us. It was only maybe twice as high up in the air as our balcony, but was beginning to change to a more eastern direction and was starting to climb. It travelled a few more seconds directly in front of us, going further out to sea and higher in the sky. Once it had climbed to what seemed like just below a thin cloud and was just north of us (directly in front of the next building up the beach), it simply disappeared right in front of the three of us. The woman and I both did a version of a W.T.F. was that and her husband said that it must have been a meteorite. I knew it had been travelling much too slow for that but I really didn't want ti to be something that I could not identify so I tried to convince myself that there had been fluxuations and distances that without anything for perspective made it appear closer and slower than it truly was. However after returning to my home, and a few days of the incident nagging at me, I decided to check the internet to see if anyone else may have reported the object. The first thing to come up was a link to a video that had been taken at dusk, in North Myrtle Beach, just a few days prior to our sighting. The video contained a 3light object as it's main focus but also had a small orb that was a single light. Just as in our sighting the small light moved and disappeared all at once. Although it's light did seem to be more white and have less fluxuation or pulsing than what my friends and I had seen, I would have to characterize it as being far more similar than different when compared to our sighting. I am not the type of person to say I absolutely reject any possibility of extra terrestrial or alien craft, but I am probably best described as a skeptic. I respect your organization's investigations on television programs that I have seen in the past and your determination to be certain that any and all plausible explanations are exhausted before making any claims of POSSIBLE other world encounters on Earth. I am hoping you will already know what I saw or will be able to easily explain it, so I may put the matter to rest with my mind at ease. Thank You.