Can Centauros or Chirons be the first observations of evaporating mini Black Holes?

Among the various extensions of the Standard Model to energies beyond 1 TeV, one of the most attractive alternatives to the (Supersymmetric?) Great Desert Scenario is the TeV-gravity hypothesis with large extra dimensions [1]. According to it, matter particles and vector gauge bosons are open-string excitations, attached to a 3-brane (our world), which is embedded into compactified D-dimensional bulk space, where the closed-string excitations, including gravity, can propagate. This is the simplest possibility. Specific realizations of this idea and alternative scenaria may be found in [2]. Apart from a certain philosophic and aesthetic attraction of such models, they lead to the exciting possibility of experimental discovery of unification of the Standard Model with Quantum Gravity within the next few years, in the forthcoming accelerator, neutrino and cosmic-ray experiments [3, 4, 5]. Moreover, one could even claim that Quantum Gravity phenomena are already present in existing cosmic-ray data [6]. In the present paper we shall argue that the long-known Centauro-like events (CLEs) may be due to the formation and subsequent evaporation of mini black holes (MBHs), predicted in TeV-gravity models. Our arguments are summarized in the comparative Table at the end, which describes (a) the characteristic properties of the observed CLEs, (b) the main features of the evaporating MBH events, and (c) the predictions of other popular theoretical models to explain the CLEs, namely in terms of fireballs, quark-gluon plasma and strange-matter physics. It is easy to use the Table to compare