Gibberish: exporting pdf to word is gibberish - HELP??

As suggested by Try67, if you get the same results when you copy and paste, then the reason is an encoding issue, and there is very likely not much you can do about it. The only way around this is to export your PDF file to e.g. 600dpi TIFF images, then import these images back into Acrobat. You can then run OCR (either on it's own, or as part of the export to Word function) to convert these images into text. You may not get a 100% correct representation of the text in your document, but it will be much better than what you are getting right now.

I've seen some instances mentioned of where running "Autotag Document" does fix such issues, but I don't have any first hand experience with this method. You will find this function by brining up the tools search function in Acrobat DC and type in "tag" (it's in the "Accessibility" set of tools).