Thanks from the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts! Dropping into TextEdit does it fine.
If you ever have one that's an executable, you can always open it from the command line. Just "cd" into the directory and type ./<executable name>. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I can elaborate).
I'm thinking they have a bunch of old files that OS X doesn't know what to do with so they show up as 'unix' files.
Probably mostly text files. To the OP, if you know they're text, add a .txt extension and you can double-click them to open them in TextEdit.