Jack Catran

Jack Catran was an American industrial designer, behavioral psychologist, scientist, and linguist. He was a NASA human factors engineer on the first Apollo mission and was best known for his refutation of Carl Sagans attempts to locate extraterrestrial life in outerspace.

Catran was born on January 22, 1918, to a Sephardic Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in the neighborhood of Bensonhurst where he began participating in vaudevillian theater during the 1930s and 1940s, and became interested in science as well. He had dropped out of high school but moved to Los Angeles in 1941 where he attended Chouinard Art Institute under the GI Bill. He returned to school at USC and UCLA where he earned his masters degree in psychology. He began teaching technical illustration and perspective drawing at the Van Nuys High School, Van Nuys Adult School, and San Fernando High School where he employed experimental psychology techniques in his methods. He began his career as a technical and industrial designer for the aerospace industry in Los Angeles. He later attended the University of London to obtain his doctorate in psychology. He began working for the NASA Apollo space program as a human factors engineer. Meanwhile he was editor of the journal, Feedbac

Source: Wikipedia