Every version of the "5,000" number traces back to one origin: an unpublished 2003 demonstration attributed to Heidi Yellen. The origin document is not a study report but a narrative account, including a quoted email from Yellen dated 10 February 2012: frequency was determined by a technician named Ivanne Farr using a digital instrument designed by a retired Texas A&M professor called the Ag-Environ machine, at a public demonstration with an audience at the home of artist Bob Summers . The inventor, Bob Graham, is described as having built the machine to analyze signature frequencies of agricultural commodities to help farmers determine harvest timing .

The circulated results are that a healthy human body reads about 100, linen reads 5,000 and wool reads 5,000, but when the two are combined the readings cancel to zero, with the account claiming that even wearing a wool sweater over a linen outfit "collapsed the electrical field" . The stated motivation was the instruction in Deuteronomy 22:11 not to wear wool and linen woven together .

I found no peer-reviewed publication of this work, no methods section, no sample description, no replication, and no independent validation of the measuring device. Sources sympathetic to the claim concede this. One notes that no additional studies exist beyond the single 2003 account. Another writer who tried to verify it reported that none of the sites state what units of frequency are being represented, none state whether there is any effect from wearing one fabric under another, and none provide references to the actual studies .

On the physics, a critical analysis states that the claim "wool = 5,000 Hz" is comparable to saying "a guitar string is E-flat," because it depends on string length, tension and mass, and the material alone tells you nothing , and suggests the viral chart most likely derives from a misapplication of the Bovis scale, a 20th-century pseudoscientific framework that assigned arbitrary "bioenergy units" and was never grounded in any physical measurement methodology . Another review notes that the device used was a non-standard tool that does not measure literal vibration in the physics sense of oscillations per second .