Finding text but Adobe not identifying letters or numbers

Hello all,

I am currently using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, and one issue I am having is trying to find text in the document. However, the issue is that the text appears to be special characters instead of actual numbers or letters. I tried using CTRL+F and used the settings to find my way through. CTRL+F didn't work because the text appears to be special characters that aren't actual letters or numbers. This is evident when I copied the text from the PDF document into a Word document, and the pasted text was just blank square boxes for each character. The only time it became actual letters and characters was when I click Edit PDF, and dashed text boxes appear (probably because of OCR). I am on a 300 page document so eye-searching through all of the pages is not an option. Is there a solution to this?