Unity Scene Files That Are Unreadable By Unity?

This is related to this unanswered question:http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1406634/serialized-file-version-is-higher-even-on-the-late.html

Computer crashed, reinstalled everything, Unity 5.4.4 would open my project but not my scenes saying "Failed to load 'Assets/TheOne.unity' because its serialized file version is higher than what this version of Unity supports." I then downloaded unity 2017 and it gave me the same answer. On someone else's recommendation, I changed Unity settings to "Force Text" and the Scene opened - but it was empty. Looking at the Scene files in Notepad I saw that there was basically nothing there (maybe a paragraph) compared to my backup file from a week prior, which was in a different language but was loaded to the gills with code. The backup triggers the same error messages though, in not only Binary but also Force Text and Mixed, on a fresh install of Unity, on a different computer.

The original that now opens up empty after Force Text says %YAML 1.1%TAG !u! tag:unity3d.com,2011:--- !u!29
at the beginning of the file in Notepad

The backup that fails to open in any version of Unity says: UCFS Œˆ ½;
and a whole lot more gibberish like that with a few recognizable snippets from the actual Scene itself, like :
ƒgameplay cresume Cquit

All I need to know is how to get Unity to read this strange code, it would take weeks of work if I had to rebuild the Scenes for this game. The last backup of the Scene that actually works in Unity was made in Unity 5.4.1 a year ago.

 

Same question.