The article says it's been in-progress for the last 100 million years, so "once in a billion years" is really like a 1:10 chance. Gotta get those clicks though.
The script just does all the actions that you would otherwise be manually typing in the terminal. When it's finished, you have the same minimal environment as if you'd done it manually, but with less work.
Inspecting the file with a hex editor would give you lots of useful info in this case. If you know approximately what the data should look like, you can just see where the garbage (header) ends and the data starts. I've reverse engineered data files from an oscilloscope like this.
Pardon me, did you say "Abe Lincoln"?
Edit: I was trying to reference this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJcuYKyHEgs