@broadblues
That looks like a BOM - Byte Order Marker - (slightly distorted from some program's attempt to display it as text).
There is a special place in Hell for people who insist on putting a BOM into a UTF-8 coded file. It simply doesn't make any sense, because UTF-8 by definition consists of single bytes, and one byte cannot have any order among itself.
Unfortunately, there are many "developers" out there who don't know any better.
God, the time I used to waste trying to convince people of this back when I was coding PL/SQL code to read XML files received from the outside ...
If possible, the sanest approach is of course to make your code resilient to that nonsense (which I couldn't in PL/SQL, but you luckily can).
Rant over ... oh, it's good to be retired
Best regards,
Niels