He was fired from his position at two observatories, eventually serving out his professional years at a naval shipyard in California.

See was also a critical player in the academic insurgency aimed at ousting university president Samuel Laws (in favor of See's mentor William Benjamin Smith).

See is notorious as the primary modern proponent of the idea that various ancient observers report the color of the bright star Sirius to be red as a result of stellar evolution.

See published six papers from 1892 to 1926 on the topic, making shrill attacks on critics, and ignoring the substantial numbers of texts from antiquity that described Sirius as blue or white in color.

See's obsession with what is now considered as a fringe area (whose solution involves only cultural allusions) only served to further distance the maverick from mainstream astronomy.