Particle production in very high-energy cosmic-ray emulsion chamber events: usual and unusual events

We show that a simple scaling model of very forward particle production, consistent with accelerator and air shower data, can describe all features of the very high-energy interactions recorded with emulsion chambers. This is somewhat surprising after numerous claims that the same data implied large scaling violations or new dynamics. Interestingly, we cannot describe some of the Centauro events, suggesting that these events are anomalous independently of their well-advertised unusual features such as the absence of neutral secondaries