Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (Twilight Zone)
Season 5, Episode 3 of The Twilight Zone. October 1963. Written by Richard Matheson (who also wrote I Am Legend). William Shatner plays Robert Wilson, a man recovering from a nervous breakdown who is the only passenger who can see a creature on the wing of the plane — tearing at the engine.
The creature is never named in the episode. But it is, by every folkloric measure, a gremlin — the largest documented. It lurks at the threshold between the pressurized human interior and the hostile exterior, exactly where gremlin mythology always positioned them: on the wing, on the nose, just outside the cockpit.
Why 1963
Gremlins had been quiet since the late 1940s — the jet age had made aircraft more reliable, and the Cold War had redirected anxiety toward nuclear threat rather than mechanical failure. By 1963 the anxiety had shifted again: we were in space, the Bay of Pigs had just happened, Kennedy would be dead within weeks of this episode airing. The gremlin returns precisely when control feels most illusory.
Legacy
The episode has been remade twice: once in the 1983 Twilight Zone movie (John Lithgow in the Shatner role), and parodied in The Simpsons’ “Terror at 5½ Feet” (Bart on a school bus). Each remake lands in a different cultural moment but uses the same structure: one person sees the threat, no one believes them, the threat is real.