odd text in excel 2002

My debugging steps:

1) In E1, I enter =LEN(B1). I get 15. When I count the visible characters in B1, I count 12. I suspect there are 3 non-printing, non-visible characters somewhere in the text string that are preventing Excel from recognizing the date.
2) I enter =CODE(MID($B1,COLUMN(A1),1)) into F1 and copy across as far as needed. I recognize most of the character codes, except a character code 226 just before each number.
3) I enter B1, position the cursor at this unknown character and delete the character. Once I have removed these three characters, my spreadsheet recognizes the date.

It appears that the problem is related to these unknown characters. Removing them (manually, or using a SUBSTITUTE() or REPLACE() function or using a Find/Replace command should allow you to convert these to real date values.

found the the extra whatevers are in the spaces between the month and day, and between the day and year,
how do i remove them on hundreds of dates?
thanks
PS CLEAN does not work on this problem

UPDATE sadly some have an extra character at the start as well

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