Strange Things In The Sky

As a smoker and relegated to feeding my habit outside (fair enough), I've seen a few weird things while looking at the sky over the years to leave me open minded to UFO's etc. However I've felt the need to post as I've seen the same strange thing over the last couple of nights.

Last night I was watching a small light the size of a star moving across the sky (I see these quite a lot but not sure if they may be satellites?), however the light last night suddenly expanded very quickly into a much larger and almost fluorescent light. A second or two later it shrunk again, the small light moved on a bit further and then disappeared.

I thought o.k. that's weird but on my last ciggy ten minutes ago I have just seen the same expanding flare up of light in roughly the same location. This time there wasn't a small light moving across the sky beforehand like last night, but the flash of light was identical.

Both sightings were far too high to be Chinese lanterns and were much too slow to be meteorites (I've seen plenty of both to know what they look like).

Has anyone seen anything similar or know what it is?

I'm on the south coast of England (East Sussex to be exact).