My wife had left some things on the clothes line and it was forecast to rain late evening. i work nights and had been up about an hour. i took the clothes down and put the basket on the patio. i usually always have a smoke and walk around the yard, check out the sky. the far side of the yard is pretty clear with a good view west. as soon as i looked up i noticed 2 very bright red lights. had no idea what this was. both we motionless, one was much larger than the other. from my vantage point one was about the size of the moon, the smaller one about the size of a very bright star. i stood staring at them for about a min or so and the small light was at about 11 o'clock in relation to the large light and maybe what looked to be about 6 inches between them. the small light slowly moved right above the large light keeping what looked to be the same distance. it again was motionless for maybe 20-30 seconds and returned to the eleven o'clock position. within about 30 seconds it slowly went straight up into the cloud cover. the large red light this whole time has not moved or changed the intensity of its red color. the small red light was not visible through the clouds. about 10-20 seconds it became visible again and was descending untill it was nearly out of sight because of the tree line. just before it left sight, the large red light flashed very bright, in fact enough to eliminate a quick red glow on the clouds above. it then started to decend. with the small light now no longer visible and the large one nearing the tree line i could hear a helicopter not far away east of my location. just as the large light dropped out of my line of sight, i could see the helicopter because it had a very powerful spot light on the front. it travelled nearly over my house at a very high rate of speed, at least i've never seen a helicopter at that speed at tree top level in a residential area before. in fact i was quite surprised because we have high tension power lines very near us and they ate up much higher than the tree level. at this point both objects/red lights are totally out of my view and the helicopter also left my sight in the same vicinity as the lights. i'm guessing the distance was maybe a quarter mile or just slightly more which puts 2 major freeways, 94/694 west and 252 going north and south nearly right underneath where i saw the lights. i didn't know what to think when i first saw the lights, but the movement and flash of light was spectacular, most likely a once in a life time observance. the helicopter with the search light sealed my thoughts and confirmed it was most likely something more than just red lights. this whole episode was less than 5min and it has definitely changed my perspective on ufo's.