Long Description of Sighting Report

My husband went out on our back deck at 8:00 pm last night, December 3rd, 2008, then he came rushing in the house telling me to come outside because he spotted a ufo. He said when he first saw it he thought it was a star but then it moved about the sky. I went out with him at about 8:04pm and he pointed to an object in the western sky that appeared to be a very bright white large star but then it started moving. It was too far away, west of Banks towards the coastal range, to distinquish a shape. We live in rural Banks, Oregon 25 miles west of Portland.We both watched this thing for quite sometime as it moved horizontally to the left then the right, straight up and down then zig zag patterns. It appeared at times to move our direction then it would move left and right and in different patterns of movement. At one point as we watched we saw a bright white flash to the right of the original thing at about a 45 degree angle lower in the sky. Then another bright flash to the left of the thing. About the time we saw a the first flash below and to the right of the original object we also saw what we thought was a plane moving from a N direction to the south. During our observation you could hear many dogs in the general area barking. We watched this for about an hour then came inside. I remember thinking,what is it doing and if we can see it, can it see us. We had seen a similar object from our front deck towards the eastern sky about 7 years ago.