Was in North Myrtle Beach, SC with friend . At 9:20pm, her ears began ringing & she walked out onto the balcony & called to me about a red light over the water. I ran out, and about 35-40 degrees above the horizon, saw a pulsating red light. it was round or orb-like in shape. The night was very clear, and very quiet, there was no sound from the waves, and no wind. No clouds. No boats, planes, swimmers, no fireworks. The quiet was eerie....in fact, earlier in the day we had remarked on how quiet it was, for the beach. We kept watching, and figured that the direction of the lighted object was S/SW. The object appeared again, now reddish orange, then reappeared to the right, then left. Then it split in two, and pulsated....at that point it seemed more orb-like and the object seemed to have a solid center. Then it winked out completely, and we searched the skies. Orions belt, Betelguese, Saturn....all kinds of stars/planets/constellations were visible, and this wasnt one of them. NOT a boat. NOT a plane, or a flare, or a firework. The red object reappeared in the sky to the SE, almost dead ahead. Visibility that night was 9 miles. I estimated the size at penny for the red object. It pulsated again....we had not seen it move from the SW; it just reappeared to the SE. Then, it was gone. All remained still and quiet. We were still trying to figure out what the red object had been, when in the SE sky---a bit more to N, and higher on the horizon---we saw a group of smaller white round objects. These were in groups, and were flashing/blinking rhythmically, in a definite pattern....for 5 minutes or so, they were in the same place in the sky, then as a group, they began moving toward the SW, continuing to blink. We watched them from the balcony, then from the front of the building until they disappeared. By 9:40pm, all the objects were gone. Around 10pm, a plane went over, and though it was much higher than the objects, we could easily hear it & identify all 3 lights on the plane. I later looked at Google Starmap, and we couldn"t find a sattelite in the area, either. so---unsure what it was, but unable to explain it away!