Gremlins:
English pilots first began talking about them during the Second World War.
During flights, for no apparent reason, engines and machine guns would suddenly start acting up, and sights and other instruments would malfunction. The occurrence was difficult to explain, as aircraft were generally thoroughly checked before every takeoff.
Counterintelligence officers worked themselves to exhaustion searching for Nazi saboteurs. But what Counterintelligence and numerous commissions failed to do, the rank-and-file pilots achieved — they found the culprits. They turned out to be tiny evil spirits. They nested in the aircraft — in the slots and under the cladding — and played pranks. They were dubbed gremlins. After some time, gremlins appeared in America. But unlike the English gremlins, they settled in other types of machinery as well.
There were those who took them seriously and those who were skeptics. Refusing to believe in evil spirits, the latter ridiculed them in every way. Walt Disney was among the skeptics, employing a caricatured image of gremlins. From sinister creatures, they were transformed into funny, cute rascals. Laughter killed the belief, and by the end of the war, people stopped talking about them.
Material from Wikipedia:
Gremlin (Eng.Gremlin) — a mythical creature]], a malicious prankster, akin to a domovoy.
Apparently, the term first appeared in 1940 among English pilots and aviation technicians during the Battle of Britain. The first publication about the gremlin "phenomenon" was a story in the "Royal Air Force Journal" from April 181942.
It is believed that gremlins love to settle in the engines of cars, planes, and other machinery. It is precisely because of their pranks that equipment won't start or even breaks down. To appease gremlins, it was customary to use a mixture of beer and machine oil, which was poured into a tin can and placed in the immediate vicinity of the technical unit.
But this is just as an aside... It's just that if you're going to create creatures, you should create them... rather than using a caricature...
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