I was driving with my wife in a poorly lit, quiet neighborhood in (somewhat) rural No. San Diego Co. on a clear and "weatherless" night. I turned a sharp corner, and I saw a single point of flickering orange / red light in the sky about 45º up off of level sight. I said "What is that?", and pulled the car over. It appeared to be a floating flame in the sky pointed upward. I got out and as I stood next to the car, I noticed that it was moving slowly eastward through the sky and then it made a gentle right turn (about 70-80 degrees) and headed southward. By this time it was nearly over our heads. Maybe 80º up. I could not hear any noise from it. I did not want to take my eyes off of it, for fear it would zip out of sight while I took my cell phone out and took a pic of it. (The pic looks like a orange dot in the middle of blackness.) I tried to reason with my wife about what it might be. The best I could come up with was a Chinese lantern, but there was no glow from a shroud or any "structure" to it. Only the flame. It was impossible to tell how far away it was. It was so high off the horizon that there were no size reference, but it appeared to be 100 - 200 ft. off the ground and slowly ascending. If it was farther away, then it would have been a larger object (than a lantern). It had no "blinking" lights. It stopped moving altogether and the light from it started getting dimmer. I could not tell if this was because it was a flame that was burning out, or it was moving away from me. It no longer appeared flame shaped. Now it was just a dot. Then in an instant it was just gone. It vanished. I waited about another minute to see if would reappear, but it didnt. The whole sighting took only about 3-4 mins, but it was in the sky long before we saw it. It was definitely NOT a plane, a helicopter, a bug, a hot air balloon, the space station, the Moon, a star or Mars, etc.