Episode Guide

Beneath the sunny façade of Sydney, Australia lies a dark past. Built on the backs of convicts, gold miners and outlaws, this nation forged its freedom from the depths of the underground.

Explore Australia's Alcatraz, the 19th century prison that housed Sydney's most threatening criminals. Travel deep into a complex of natural caves that sheltered a gang of escaped outlaws, and the gold mines that produced both riches and the birth of the worker's movement.

Don heads underground with surviving witnesses to uncover the location of a secret WWII chemical weapons stash and gets access to a sordid subterranean fort where soldiers en route to the battlefields of Vietnam were trained to resist torture.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was plunged into chaos for centuries, with vicious carnage and rampant disease regularly raging through the streets. However, below the streets was another world designed to keep the people alive and the enemy guessing.

Join host Don Wildman as he uncovers immense quarries of a secret society, Templar torture chambers and the tunnels of medieval "ghost knights."

Hundreds of ghost stories lurk in the shadows of London, but behind every myth and legend is the terrifying truth that sheds light on one of the darkest periods of this city's history.

In Victorian times, violent crimes, extreme poverty and lawlessness forced Londoners to band together to survive. In a time when science and medicine challenged the Church, and disease and overpopulation drove the poor to do jobs only the Devil himself could imagine, London set the stage for chaos.

From body snatchers and serial killers to occult clubs and pagan rituals, Victorian Londoners lived by their own rules... both above and below ground. Don Wildman explores London from the bottom up and tells the stories most would rather remain buried.

The gladiators of ancient Rome were the ultimate fighting machines. They waged bloody battles to the death for the entertainment of the masses - and to earn their freedom.

From the depths of the vicious and magnificent Flavian amphitheater, to the buried brothel where they lived their last days, these are the secret lives of Rome's famed slave warriors.

Peel back the layers to uncover the origin of these fierce fighters, as host Don Wildman heads into ancient crypts, subterranean chambers used for pagan worship, and to the school that taught the gladiators how survive... and how to kill.

Located on the coveted gateway between the East and West, Turkey has a history marked by ambitious conquerors and great empires vying for control of the trade routes.

Left behind was a rich mythology of gods and men with tales of epic battles that soaked Turkey's soil in blood.

We'll uncover the truth behind these mysterious legends, revealing how a nation at war turned underground for its only means of survival, a maniacal king's plot to overturn consecrated ground to build one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and even an ancient healing spa of the gods!

World War I was the bloodiest war the world had ever seen, and a young Adolf Hitler was amongst the men who served in the trenches and tunnels of Belgium's Western Front.

Join host Don Wildman as he explores the subterranean web where 24,000 Allied soldiers waited to ambush the enemy, and the indestructible fortress that endured thousands of bombs daily.

Discover the underground that made World War I one of the most brutal wars in history... and turned Hitler into the terrifying madman of World War II.

He was the mastermind of the most notorious murders in U.S. history, terrifying the world and plunging the city of Los Angeles into a state of paranoia and fear.

His name is Charles Manson, and the deserts around Los Angeles were his home - where he hoped the underground would be his haven. But Manson and his followers weren't the only dangers lurking beneath the streets of LA. We'll take you below the most congested avenues of this classic American city, into the tunnels where corrupt cops secretly ran the city, and where the largest subway system in the world lies in waste.

From earthquakes to UFOs, Los Angeles - population 9 million plus - has to be ready for anything. With military bunkers protecting our shores and subterranean disaster-relief war rooms surveying the next big quake, LA's underground holds the key to its survival.

Join host Don Wildman as he travels to Sicily to trace the mafia's roots back to when they were a vigilante secret society in an underground network.

The original mafia was created to hold trials against corrupt city officials and execute the accused. Follow Don as he tracks the escape route of a most-wanted mob boss through ancient subterranean waterways. There he'll discover a bone-crypt that holds the key to Sicily's violent past.

Finally, Don will reveal how the mafia entrenched themselves forever into Sicilian society by teaming up with the Allies during World War II and undermining the Axis' bunkers deep within the Sicilian hillsides.

Ethiopia is home to some of the oldest settlements in the world. This cradle of mankind is a country born from legend and shrouded in mystery.

An ancient home to both Jews and Muslims, Ethiopia is also the world's second oldest Christian nation. But if you were a Christian during ancient times, and if you wanted to stay alive, the only place to practice your faith was underground.

From underground engineering marvels to remote, cliff-hanging caves, Ethiopia's isolated churches allowed Christianity to evolve in ways found nowhere else in the world. From tombs of vanished emperors and subterranean cathedrals where orthodox priests have been worshipping for thousands of years, to the buried Palace of the Queen of Sheba and the possible resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, clues to Ethiopia's lost legends and tribes are littered right here...in the African underground.

Welcome to Las Vegas, America's Sin City where casinos have made security their highest priority. Join host Don Wildman as he uncovers underground vaults, secret surveillance nerve centers, and how the latest technology beats the cheaters.

Don shows how a massive engineering feat transformed the city from a barren desert into a mobster metropolis where thieves ran the show from underground tunnels dating back to Prohibition. Vegas is the only city in the world where you can be in Egypt one moment and Italy the next, thanks to a secret underground.

The urban sprawl of Cairo, Egypt belies its history as one of the world's oldest civilizations, where the Pharaohs' ancient secrets lie hidden deep below the vast deserts of the Nile.

Don Wildman embarks on an underground quest to explore the massive engineering might of the oldest structures in the world, and learn how the pyramids survived a long history of invasions by the Mediterranean's greatest civilizations: the Greeks, Romans and Turks.

The Step Pyramid, constructed a century before the great structures at Giza, reveals hidden insights into how the Pharaohs died; an eerily detailed roadmap to the afterlife known as "The Book of the Dead" is examined; and a lost tomb filled with 2,000-year-old mummies is serendipitously discovered.

Cairo is a city of the living and the dead, with its darkest secrets hidden in the tunnels of the ancient underworld.

The largest naval armada in U.S. history descended on the Japanese island of Okinawa in April of 1945. Instead of a swift victory for the Americans it became the bloodiest battle of the Pacific.
 
The largest naval armada in U.S. history descended on the Japanese island of Okinawa in April of 1945. Instead of a swift victory for the Americans it became the bloodiest battle of the Pacific.

Much of the battle was not on land, but underneath it - from the beehive of combat tunnels to the caves where thousands of civilians hid. Join host Don Wildman as he discovers what it was like to live through the Battle of Okinawa.

Watch as he delves into the subterranean tunnels, caves, and bunkers, and then dives to explore the lost naval destroyer sunken deep in the waters off Okinawa's coast.

While most people think of San Francisco as a haven for peace-loving hippies, this city by the Bay is actually one of the biggest military defense installations in America.

We'll take you beneath its picturesque hills and uncover the biggest ammunitions depot on the West Coast, before plunging into a deadly arsenal that once stored nuclear missiles with more than six times the destructive power of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

From the secret Civil War fortification buried beneath Alcatraz to the human trafficking tunnels winding below Chinatown, San Francisco's underground is evidence of its sordid past.