Weird stuff in weird.log

I'm seeing some odd stuff in my weird.log on a cluster. It looks an extra tab character is getting put in after null values and then it's escaped. Any clue what happened?

1318046447.381516 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 non_IPv4_packet -\x09 T
1318046447.960574 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 non_IPv4_packet -\x09 T
1318046447.960867 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 non_IPv4_packet -\x09 T
1318046513.637314 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 non_IPv4_packet -\x09 T
1318046447.932012 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 non_IPv4_packet -\x09 T
1318046447.935414 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 -\x09 non_IPv4_packet -\x09 T

  .Seth