LOL, I knew someone would ask that eventually :) Well, I have a function that takes a parameter of any sort (array ref, string, hash, object, etc...), and depending on the type of the param, it does different things. Without knowing if the parameter has been blessed or not, I cannot say:

$param->isa('Foo')
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since that can return an error. So instead, I have to use:

UNIVERSAL::isa($param, 'Foo');
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Which is, of course, alot to type, hence the alias.

Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention that it wasn't exactly my idea:

These subroutines should not be imported via use UNIVERSAL qw(...).
If you want simple local access to them you can do

  *isa = \&UNIVERSAL::isa;

to import isa into your package.
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That was taken from the <cough> UNIVERSAL.pm documentation ;)