Byte Order Mark (BOM) not handled
Consider this:
#%RAML 0.8
title: BOM bombs
version: v1
schemas:
- NotNice: !include NotASchema.json
/test:
get:
responses:
200:
body:
application/json:
schema: NotNice
The binary view of NotASchema.json is shown below:

The validation code:
RamlValidationService svc = RamlValidationService.createDefault();
...
results = svc.validate(raml, location);
The error:

Removing the BOM from the file fixes the problem.
Aha! Link: https://mulesoft-roadmap.aha.io/features/APIRAML-151
this issue was addressed by 09162cb757f651e836f6a1d1a936516cb484593a you can give it a try with 0.8.8 release or latest 0.9-SNAPSHOT
I just tried it with the latest 0.9-SNAPSHOT and it still complains about the BOM. In another test case, I've simply saved sequence-trait.yaml with a BOM, I've opened the include-sequence.yaml (these are files from the test package) and I get an error message (saying the paged trait cannot be found, which it would be because BOM + paged comes as a different key).