The Hindenburg Bombing

The Hindenburg was a humungous story. I mean, it wasn't actually the only one. There was a British ship called the R101 or something like that that it went down in flames over India. So there was a couple of well publicized disasters that scared people off from airships. The popular belief at the time was not that they were aliens. They had the much more Victorian answer, which was that this was the product of some rogue genius who was not ready to make the knowledge of their great invention public yet.