The BEST episodes of National Geographic Documentaries season 2009

#1 - Direct from the Moon

Season 2009 - Episode 38 - Aired 11/5/2009

With stunning footage from the Kaguya lunar orbiter, NGC reveals images of the moon and Earth like never seen before, and unlocks the secrets of 4.5 billion years of Earth, moon and solar system history.

#2 - Alien Earths

Season 2009 - Episode 30 - Aired 8/23/2009

Join leading astronomers on a visual journey beyond our solar system in search of planets like Earth. Using CGI animation, we’ll explore bizarre worlds that stretch our imagination: planets with iron rain and hot ice, with diamonds everywhere, and endless oceans of gas. Planets with abnormal orbital patterns and planets with no pattern at all that drift alone in the Milky Way. Planets so strange we never could have predicted them before. Could life exist there?

#3 - Hubble's Final Frontier

Season 2009 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/23/2009

Astronauts are preparing to rendezvous one last time to refurbish and re-boost the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. Its a dangerous mission, so why is Hubble worth the risk? Hubble has been the key that has unlocked many secrets of the Universe. Take an excursion into the high frontiers of space as we explore the epic discoveries of made with Hubble. See how Hubble has explored the creation of stars and planets, the glory of supernovas, the formation of super massive black holes, charted dark matter and changed forever our understanding of reality itself. See how Hubble has glimpsed the origins of our Universe and the end of time. And see what NASA has planned for the orbiting telescope, and the successor to the Hubble program, the "James Webb Space Telescope".

#4 - Drain the Ocean

Season 2009 - Episode 26 - Aired 8/9/2009

This is a world you have never seen before - a world normally hidden under miles of water, the ocean floor. We'll remove the water using CGI animation, revealing a landscape of unimaginable scale with features more dramatic than anything on dry land.

#5 - Animals at the Edge

Season 2009 - Episode 27 - Aired 8/10/2009

Before today is over, at least 100 animal species will have disappeared from the planet forever. Thanks to a handful of dedicated scientists – a new generation of Noahs – Animals At The Edge won't be among them. As a flood of industrial development and urban expansion devours the planet's forests, species are being pushed into extinction 1000 times faster than at any other time in history. But for a few species, there is hope. Animals At The Edge takes viewers around the globe, into high-tech captive breeding programs where the last members of a few species are fighting for survival. Do these survivors hold the key to reviving whole species? Or have they been reduced to mere curiosities, staring down the abyss of extinction? And what does the planet's shrinking biodiversity mean for the future of our species? Animals At The Edge takes viewers to the remote and unlikely places where these embattled creatures are making their last stand.

#6 - On Board Marine One

Season 2009 - Episode 51 - Aired 4/21/2009

We'll take to the skies with the presidential helicopter Marine One as it flies to the nation's largest city. To protect the President, Marine One must flawlessly coordinate with the Marines, the New York Police Department, and the Secret Service.O

#7 - History's Hardest Prison

Season 2009 - Episode 21 - Aired 5/17/2009

If you think debtors today have a hard time, go back 300 years with Piers Hernu to London's Fleet Prison. Greed and fraud leads to one of the biggest financial meltdowns ever. Thousands of investors lose everything. Sound familiar? Except this was nearly 300 years ago and the losers are thrown not just into debt, but into one of the most brutal prisons of all time. Who better to investigate than former city boy turned gold smuggler Piers Hernu. He found himself sharing a crowded cell in Nepal. But that was a picnic compared to the hell of London's notorious Fleet prison. Toffs and commoners alike were banged up under the brutal regime of governor Thomas Bambridge. Georgian society was horrified to discover the torture, cruelty and death that took place behind the walls of Fleet Prison, conveniently located on the edge of the City Of London.

#8 - America Before Columbus

Season 2009 - Episode 44 - Aired 11/22/2009

National Geographic embarks on an expedition into the mysterious world of ancient American history to shed a different light on the history of the Americas. History books traditionally depict the pre-Columbus Americas as a pristine wilderness where small native villages lived in harmony with nature. But scientific evidence tells a very different story: When Columbus stepped ashore in 1492, millions of people were already living there. America wasn't exactly a "New World," but a very old one whose inhabitants had built a vast infrastructure of cities, orchards, canals and causeways. But after Columbus set foot in the Americas, an endless wave of explorers, conquistadors and settlers arrived, and with each of their ships came a Noah's Ark of plants, animals—and disease. In the first 100 years of contact, entire civilizations were wiped out and the landscape was changed forever.

#9 - Drug War Zone

Season 2009 - Episode 47 - Aired 12/13/2009

An insight into the drug trade in Mexico and the violence associated with it, which led to more murders in 2009 than there were casualties in Iraq over the same period

#10 - Inside the Iraq War

Season 2009 - Episode 46 - Aired 12/13/2009

This two-hour documentary looks through the scope of a rifle to tell the inside story of the Iraq War. We interview the men and women who fought on the front lines and use rarely-seen footage, shot by US troops, to give the viewer a personal look at modern warfare.

#11 - Great Escape: The Final Secrets

Season 2009 - Episode 24 - Aired 8/2/2009

A top-secret unit known as MIS-X helped Allied POWs dig massive tunnels and coordinate elaborate escape plans from German prison camps. MIS-X officers and former prisoners divulge how they smuggled radios, maps and money into the camps. AKA: Escape Factory

#12 - Living with Big Cats

Season 2009 - Episode 35 - Aired 10/23/2009

Filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert forge a relationship with a week-old leopard in Africa. This is the intimate story of the relationship between two filmmakers and a wild leopard. Since encountering Legadema as a cub, Dereck and Beverly Joubert have built up a remarkable attachment to her.

#13 - Secrets of the Tang Treasure Ship

Season 2009 - Episode 25 - Aired 8/8/2009

Historians have long speculated that thousands of wooden ships plied a Maritime Silk Route from the Middle East to China, braving long distances on white-capped seas, but time and the deep ocean have destroyed any evidence . . . until now. In 1998 German engineer Tilman Walterfang found a shipwreck from the 9th Century blanketed by intact gold, silver and ceramic items. As we uncover clues and reveal the story of the wreck, reenactments transport us back in time to an age of the legendary Sinbad the Sailor, when vicious seas ravaged wooden boats like matchsticks. Through interviews with maritime archaeologists and ceramic experts we bring these characters to life by examining unique items recovered from the wreck and painting a vivid picture of glorious 9th Century Tang China. We reveal where the treasure now lies, in high security storage in Singapore. National Geographic show the incredible 60,000 pieces recovered – amid them are unique gold and silver items never before seen. It is a time capsule from a distant seafaring age that will take generations to fully understand. We piece together the last days of the ship’s journey before its untimely end in the treacherous straits of Indonesia and reveal one of the ancient world’s greatest trading routes and the brave men who sailed it.

#14 - Humpbacks: Giants of the Ocean

Season 2009 - Episode 36 - Aired 10/31/2009

Humpback whales are icons of their kind. They capture our imagination with their power, their grace and their song. Now with National Geographic's CritterCam, we'll go where few have gone to capture some of the most intimate and astounding moments of these giants of the sea. We'll find out who calls the shots in the mating game and who gets beaten and bruised. We'll see some of the most extraordinary scenes ever captured between a mother and her infant. And for the first time ever, we'll see how a young calf learns the skills it will need to survive.

#15 - Swine Flu: The Science of Pandemics

Season 2009 - Episode 19 - Aired 5/14/2009

NGC goes inside the science of how a super flu virus develops and mutates, and the quick but complex decisions that must be made when trying to contain a new flu virus on the run.

#16 - Lost Cave Temples of the Himalayas

Season 2009 - Episode 41 - Aired 11/18/2009

Seven-time Everest summiter Pete Athans, and big wall climber Renan Ozturk take on the dangerous job of climbing into the crumbling caves. Their goals are to get inside the inaccessible cave cities that humans have not entered for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to document what's inside and to search for nine legendary cave temples called "kabum." What they find goes far beyond their expectations, rocking the Himalayan world and rewriting the history of this remote and mystical region, previously off-limits to outsiders.

#17 - The Real Abraham Lincoln

Season 2009 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/20/2009

Lincoln's journey from his early years as a rising politician through his presidency, the Civil War, and his untimely death.

#18 - Secret Life of Charles Lindbergh

Season 2009 - Episode 22 - Aired 7/27/2009

Charles Lindbergh becomes the world’s most famous man in 1927 when he flies non-stop from New York to Paris. But behind the legend was a man who juggled multiple secret lovers and took on a President.

#19 - The First Jesus?

Season 2009 - Episode 43 - Aired 11/20/2009

He was called the King of the Jews, believed to be a Messiah and just before Passover, the Romans beheaded him and crucified many of his followers. But his name was not Jesus. It was Simon, a self-proclaimed Messiah who died four years before Christ was born. Now, new analysis of a metre-tall stone tablet from the first century BC, being hailed by scholars as a “Dead Sea Scroll on stone,” speaks of an early Messiah and his resurrection. Was Simon of Peraea real? Did his life serve as the prototype of a Messiah for Jesus and his followers? And could this tablet shake up the basic premise of Christianity? Head to Israel to assess this unique and mysterious artefact, including testing by a leading archaeological geologist and comprehensive review of the letters, script and content by a Dead Sea Scroll expert. Then, from Jerusalem to Jericho, researchers investigate key archaeological ruins which could help prove Simon was indeed real – all of which just might sway the sceptics.

#20 - Hitler's Hidden Holocaust

Season 2009 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/8/2009

This film goes inside the tragic story of an estimated 1.5 million people at hundreds of sites and how the Nazi military committed these horrific crimes.

#21 - Lincoln: American Mastermind

Season 2009 - Episode 45 - Aired 11/23/2009

#22 - Titanic: How it Really Sank

Season 2009 - Episode 18 - Aired 5/12/2009

The sinking of the Titanic was far more than a simple accident. A tragedy that could have been prevented, it was the result of a long chain of mistakes: a fatal series of avoidable human errors that sent the Titanic and more than half of her passengers to their watery graves. Based upon the official inquiry held immediately after the event, with additional evidence that's come to light since the wreck of the ship was discovered in 1985, National Geographic, in this drama-documentary special, explores Titanic: How It Really Sank. Aired on 2009.

#23 - Secrets Of The Druids

Season 2009 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/22/2009

Although they left no writings of their own, the Druids have had a profound impact on modern culture. The Druids of Celtic Britain are remembered as mystical holy men, holding the secrets of nature. But ancient sources - including Julius Caesar himself - accused them of human sacrifice, even cannibalism. Now, new discoveries are uncovering the secrets of these Celtic pagan priests. Archaeological evidence reveals the truth about Druid sacrifice and tells the story of the Druids' last stand against Rome's conquering legions. Learn how a recent discovery of a cloaked man buried almost 2,000 years ago with mysterious metal rods has been linked with the Druids for the first time.

#24 - Tomb of 1,000 Roman Skeletons

Season 2009 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/3/2009

#25 - Dinosaurs Decoded

Season 2009 - Episode 34 - Aired 10/11/2009

National Geographic reviews Jack Horner's research into juvenile dinosaurs. His evidence suggests that juvenile dinosaurs looked sufficiently different from adults that they have sometimes been mistaken for a separate species. The program examines specific changes that occurred as dinosaurs aged and speculates on why the changes were necessary.