Little Hawk (and others),
challenging someone else's perception and/or recollection is always a bit difficult for it seems to amount to saying 'I have no trust in you'. Well, the person I trust most in my life (that's myself) has had quite a few wrong and sometimes embarrasing false perceptions in his life. I do not mean to say that most of our perceptions are wrong, only very few are and I bet you are a person whose perception and recollection is about as reliable as everyone else's (including mine) - usually.
What do I do with your description of what you have seen? Well, I look for the most likely explanation. Skip all paragraphs until the last if you want to know immediately what I consider the most likely explanation. If you don't skip I'll take you through several hypotheses from extremely unlikely to likely.
Hypothesis 1: You've seen a real craft controlled by alien intelligence. I personally do believe in the possibility of other lifeforms in the universe, some of them even intelligent in our sense, but for reasons outlined in other posts I consider it extremely unlikely that we are 'visited' at this time. Are there more probable hypotheses? Yes.
Hypothesis 2: You're a hoaxer. From your posts and your way of writing I consider this also extremely unlikely and I am not working on that hypothesis (though I won't forget that possibility in general).
Hypothesis 3: You were deluded at that time. It can happen rarely (see grab for a fine explanation and description), but I have good reasons not to believe this hypothesis in your case.
Hypothesis 4: A complete illusion of memory. Not very likely, but it can happen. Think of it as, e.g., the recollection of a movie scene(or a vivid description in a book) in your mind transported into personal reality . Remotely possible, but I don't go for it for there is still a much better hypothesis.
Hypothesis 5(number 1 hypothesis for most UFO sightings): Mixture of real perception and partial illusion of memory/perception. This hypothesis goes as follows: You have seen something real which you couldn't find a mundane explanation for. The details of your description are not necessarily all correct, for under difficult sighting conditions we all make bold guesses as to what we see and our brain is wired in a way that we try to make sense out of what we see at nearly any price (conjurers work on that knowledge to fool us). So I do not have (nor need) explanations for all UFO sightings fitting all details of the descriptions. There are ample experiments to show that what we think we see will heavily influence our memory of what we have seen (an experiment in a nutshell: researchers had arranged that UFO believers on a hill were shown lights. Since the lights were under experimental control the researchers knew exactly which position they were and how long they were on. They compared UFO believers recollections with reality and found that many errors like reporting movement when there was none were made. These errors were not random, they were in the direction of the UFO hypothesis). And then there are a few facts from perception usually not know to lay persons like that especially in the dark you can mistake your eye movements for object movements.
There may be some more hypotheses possible but I am contented with these five and I won't go for the first one as long as much more probable hypotheses remain.
So in most cases I think the reporters have seen a UFO that is a flying object that was unknown to them but mundane and their descriptions from memory do not really fit the object they have actually seen for the combined work of illusions of perception and memory. But the appearance must not necessarily have been flying nor an object at all. And that brings me to what I considers the most probable single explanation in your case.
Your description #1 is a beautiful textbook description for UFO sightings originating from the action of laser lights from, e.g., a distant disco on the lower cloud surface (which itself is invisible at night). It fits the soundlessless, the cycling, the illumination, the lack of interior details, the standing still and sudden movement, the lack of clear size and distance and some other details. That's the single explanation for this case I would place my bet on.

Wolfgang