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The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
I'm skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn't have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
Wait, I said manned? D'Oh!
Wasn't he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
Yes, they did that for all those experiments back then.