Your environment is somehow causing the output to be in a 16-bit/character format rather than pure binary. Here is the output of the first few bytes using “hexdump -c”:
0000000 <FF> <FE> # \0 ? \0 R \0 A \0 D \0 I \0 A \0
0000010 N \0 C \0 E \0 \r \0 \n \0 o \0 c \0 o \0
0000020 n \0 v \0 \0 - \0 f \0 \0 J \0 u \0
0000030 n \0 2 \0 1 \0 _ \0 1 \0 2 \0 0 \0 0 \0
0000040 _ \0 s \0 s \0 . \0 s \0 k \0 y \0 \0
0000050 2 \0 2 \0 2 \0 0 \0 5 \0 0 \0 _ \0 R \0
0000060 2 \0 2 \0 _ \0 8 \0 6 \0 _ \0 C \0 O \0
A similar problem was posted here.
Cheers,
-Greg