Larry E. Morris summarizes evidence for people seeing and handling the golden plates.
Larry E. Morris, “Empirical Witness of the Gold Plates,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 52, no. 2 (2019): 59–84
Due to the fact that visiting with angels isn’t part of the normal human experience, it makes it hard for historians to prove that it happened through an academic investigation. The best way, as discussed by the author, to determine what really happened is by studying other individual’s first-hand accounts about the Gold Plates.