"Ben K." <bkim(at)coe(dot)tamu(dot)edu> writes:
> I thought UTF8 was safe if all I have is ascii,
It is, but evidently what you have is not all ASCII.
> ERROR: invalid UTF-8 byte sequence detected near byte 0x85
Looks to me like it might have been meant as LATIN1 or one of
the other single-byte ASCII-extension encodings.
If you think your data should be all ASCII, then you have some
data-cleaning to do.
regards, tom lane