The visual detection of other people is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of human bodies. In the first series of studies, we used continuous flash suppression to render stimuli invisible and measured the time upright and inverted stimuli needed to overcome such interocular suppression. Upright bodies broke suppression more quickly than inverted bodies, while suppression durations for inanimate objects were not affected by inversion. Next, we used an inattentional blindness paradigm (1 trial per participant) to test whether a briefly presented upright body silhouette is more likely to be noticed than an inverted silhouette, even when nothing is expected. Results (N=2000) showed higher detection rates for upright bodies than inverted bodies. No such inversion effect was observed for a control object (plants). Finally, using fMRI we tested whether bodies (and control objects) activate high-level representations in visual cortex when they are task-irrelevant and spatially unattended. Results showed that activity patterns in high-level visual cortex carried information about the presence of bodies but not about other object categories under these conditions. Furthermore, this body-selective response was modulated by feature-based attention in a spatially global manner. Altogether, these results indicate that the form of the human body is processed pre-attentively, resulting in privileged access to awareness, enhanced detection, and selective processing in visual cortex even when unattended. Such a pre-attentive detection mechanism ensures that we rarely fail to notice the presence of other people.