diff --git a/KeywordSearch/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/keywordsearch/TikaTextExtractor.java b/KeywordSearch/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/keywordsearch/TikaTextExtractor.java
index 1fa93609ea..3ccf669b58 100644
--- a/KeywordSearch/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/keywordsearch/TikaTextExtractor.java
+++ b/KeywordSearch/src/org/sleuthkit/autopsy/keywordsearch/TikaTextExtractor.java
@@ -259,6 +259,15 @@ class TikaTextExtractor implements TextExtractor {
      * This method determines if a passed-in Java char (16 bits) is a valid
      * UTF-8 printable character, returning true if so, false if not.
      *
+     * Note that this method can have ramifications for characters outside the
+     * Unicode Base Multilingual Plane (BMP), which require more than 16 bits.
+     * We are using Java characters (16 bits) to look at the data and this will
+     * not accurately identify any non-BMP character (larger than 16 bits)
+     * ending with 0xFFFF and 0xFFFE. In the interest of a fast solution, we
+     * have chosen to ignore the extended planes above Unicode BMP for the time
+     * being. The net result of this is some non-BMP characters may be
+     * interspersed with '^' characters in Autopsy.
+     *
      * @param ch the character to test
      *
      * @return Returns true if the character is valid UTF-8, false if not.