A little tip picked up from Liam Foy Adrian Nida on #dragonflybsd on EFNet: If you have a 16-bit UTF file, cat and less will read it with ^@ characters all through the file. The pkgsrc package converters/recode will allow cleanup like so:

cat file.utf16 | recode utf16..ascii > file.ascii

Update: Several people pointed out that iconv can do the same thing.